Brian Cullman is a writer and musician based in New York and in France. He has written extensively for The Paris Review, Antaeus, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice and has won the ASCAP/Deems Taylor award for excellence in music journalism three times. He has three solo albums on Sunnyside and is currently a member of Lisbon-based group Rua Das Pretas. His new book is called How to Prepare for the Past: Travels In Music and Time.

The book is a memoir composed of vignettes, many about Brian’s encounters and relationships with fascinating people, from the 1960s on, most of them musicians and most of them no longer with us. The book kicks off with a story about Ed Sullivan, and a few of the other people we meet are Dr. John, Jimi Hendrix, Nick Drake, Paul Bowles, Big Joe Turner, and Sandy Denny.

Brian's website

Peter Stampfel's website

Peter playing "Bird Song" to a clip of Easy Rider, Radio City Music Hall, 2019

"Moment of Peter Stampfel" is from a 2010 interview he did called "Advice to Musicians"

Jonathan Coleman's books include AT MOTHER'S REQUEST: A True Story of Money, Murder, and Betrayal (which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award, and was made into a CBS miniseries); EXIT THE RAINMAKER; LONG WAY TO GO: Black and White in America; and a collaboration with basketball icon and NBA logo Jerry West, WEST BY WEST: My Charmed, Tormented Life.

He began his career in London on Ian Hamilton's legendary journal The New Review, became a book editor at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, then worked as a journalist for CBS News. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications, and is a contributing editor of The Sunday Long Read. He is also an award-winning voiceover talent and recently narrated the audiobook of Ken Auletta's HOLLYWOOD ENDING: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence. For many years, he taught narrative nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia.

Jonathan's essay on Jerry West, from The Hedgehog Review.

Aaron Latham's 1973 New York Magazine piece on Gay.

"Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," by Gay Talese, originally published in 1966 in Esquire.

"Your moment of Nan Talese" source is a Library of America conversation with her author Margaret Atwood.

Photo is of the Taleses' wedding day in Rome, 1959. Credit: Elio Cardone.

Jane Leavy grew up on Long Island, where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. She worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel, up the street from Yankee Stadium, where her grandmother’s synagogue held services on the High Holidays.

She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, covering baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the sports section and writing profiles for the Style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including profiles of comic Danny Kaye, Jane Fonda, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, and basketballer Muggsy Bogues, which was longer than he is tall.

Then she moved to writing books, beginning with Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball”. Then she wrote the national bestsellers The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, The Last Boy Book: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood , Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and now Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It.

Jane's website

Sandy Koufax career statistics

Vin Scully's call of the final inning of Koufax's 1965 perfect game

Koufax's 2022 speech at the unveiling of his statue outside Dodgers Stadium

The photograph shows Koufax after his perfect game--the four balls he's holding in his very large hands represent his four no-hitters. Credit: Bettmann

Tim Page has been the chief classical music critic for the Washington Post and New York Newsday and a regular contributor to the New York Times, where I first encountered his byline. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for work for the Post. He’s a professor emeritus of musicology at USC and his many books include The Glenn Gould Reader, Dawn Powell: A Biography, the memoir Parallel Play, and four books for the Library of America imprint, on Powell and Virgil Thompson.

Tim grew up in Storrs, Connecticut, where as a kid he was the subject of a celebrated short documentary film, A Day With Timmy Page. Over the course of his career, he has done a stint as a cocktail pianist; played keyboards and composed for his own rock band, Dover Beach; and served as the host of New, Old and Unexpected, a daily program on WNYC-FM, where he presented hundreds of radio premieres.

Stephen Merritt's website

Tim Page's Subtack

Stephen Merritt and the Future Bible Heroes, "Memories of Love"

Photo of Merritt by Kevin Yatarola

Mike Jensen spent 35 years covering basketball and other sports for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His book about Philadelphia basketball will be published in 2026 by Temple University Press. In 2024, Mike was inducted into the Big 5 Hall of Fame. He also won national Eclipse Awards for his horse racing coverage of Smarty Jones and Barbaro. Among other honors, he was named Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year and won the Jim O'Connell Award by the United States Basketball Writers Association for Excellence in Beat Reporting. He still has the trophy for winning a foul-shooting contest at the 1976 Julius Erving Basketball Camp.

His subject, the legendary William "Speedy" Morris, spent more than fifty years coaching basketball in Philadelphia on the. high school and college levels.

Morris's speech on being inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame in 2011.

Mike Jensen article on the Speedy Morris "coaching tree."

Comprehensive coverage of Morris after he coached his final game, in 2020. The photo of Morris, taken when he was coaching Penn Charter high school in 1983, is from this site.

Morris teaching the pump fake.

David Bianculli is the first return guest to The Lives They're Living. (We talked about Mason Williams in one of the first episodes.) David has been the TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross since its inception, and has been writing about television since 1975, notably at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Daily News. He's written four books: The Platinum Age Of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific (2016); Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 2009); Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (1992); and Dictionary of Teleliteracy (1996). Bianculli is professor of Television Studies at Rowan University in New Jersey.

His subject on this episode is the great writer, director, and producer James L. Brooks, who got his start some sixty years ago in an unexpected place. Since then, among many other achievements, Brooks co-created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Simpsons, and wrote and directed the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment.

Conan O'Brien talks about Brooks's laugh.

Clips of Brooks laughing.

Albert Brooks speech from Broadcast News.

Photo of Brooks by Bob Marshak, 2004.

Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the novel Glorious Boy, as well as Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face. Her nonfiction includes Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. Aimee's books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. And her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and many other periodicals and anthologies. She taught for many years in Goddard College's MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Aimee grew up mainly in Connecticut but also lived in India for two years. Her father was born in Shanghai, the son of a Chinese scholar-revolutionary and his American wife. She studied painting at Yale.

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), China Men (1980), and other works.

Some links:

2020 New Yorker profile of Ms. Kingston by Hua Hsu.

John Leonard's 1976 review of The Woman Warrior in the New York Times.

Library of America's Maxine Hong Kingston page.

"Your moment of Maxine Hong Kingston": Ms. Kingston reads from her memoir in verse, I Love a Broad Margin in My Life, in 2011.

Dave Barry is an author and humorist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated column, which ran in more than 500 newspapers and was the inspiration for the TV show Dave's World. He has also written dozens of bestselling books, including Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog, the novel Swamp Story, and, most recently, Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass. Along with Ridley Pearson, Dave wrote the bestselling Starcatchers series of young-adult novels, one of which was adapted as the Tony-award winning Broadway play Peter and the Starcatcher.

His subject is Roy Blount Jr. (pronounced "blunt"), who was raised in Decatur, Georgia, and has been writing about athletes, the South, language, movies, food, and a lot of other things for almost sixty years. He's published twenty-four books, the first of which, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load (1974), was about the Pittsburgh Steelers and was described by The New Yorker as "the best of all books about pro football," and the latest of which is Save Room for Pie: Food, Songs, and Chewy Ruminations. He's contributed articles, essays, and other stuff to 171 different publications.

Roy is a panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me; appeared frequently on A Prairie Home Companion; created and starred in a one-man show in New York, Roy Blount's Happy Hour and a Half; and wrote the screenplay for the Bill Murray movie Larger Than Life.

Photo by Joan Griswold.

Links

Roy Blount's website.

Roy's Substack.

Dave Barry's website.

Roy's 1984 Sports Illustrated profile of Yogi Berra.

The Rock Bottom Remainders singing "Wild Thing" (Roy is in the long-sleeved white t-shirt).

Video clip of Roy on the f-word (your moment of Roy Blount).