Time Sensitive The Slowdown

“The Sympathizer” author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about turning his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel into a new HBO miniseries of the same name, the polarities between what he calls “narrative plenitude” and “narrative scarcity,” the fickle nature of memory, America as a mythology, and jokes as a form of truth-telling.

The 97-year-old Pittsburgh-based artist and sculptor Thaddeus Mosley talks about sculpting art out of wood for seven decades straight; the language that poetry, music, and sculpture all share; his early years as a sportswriter for a local newspaper; and his enduring affinity for the work of Constantin Brâncuși and Isamu Noguchi.

The Brooklyn-based artist Adam Pendleton discusses the elusive, multifarious nature of his “Black Dada” philosophical framework; painting as a kind of technology; and why, for him, jazz is indefinable.

The British fashion legend Paul Smith talks about his deep, 40-plus-year engagement with the country of Japan, where he operates more than 150 stores; his long-view approach to building a business that transcends time; his ever-growing collection of rabbit ephemera; and the metamorphic impact of music and humor on his life and work.

The Belgium-born writer and critic Lucy Sante, author of the new book “I Heard Her Call My Name,” a memoir about her recent gender transition at age 66, discusses various out-of-body experiences and dislocations she had in her younger years, why she thinks of the 1960s as “a kind of magic time,” her life-transforming literary journey, and her decision to open the floodgates of her womanhood.

The British interior designer Ilse Crawford discusses her approach to crafting beautiful, highly original spaces that push against today’s speedy, copy-paste, Instagram-moment world; her early career in media, including as the celebrated founding editor of the U.K. edition of Elle Decoration; and her personal definition of the word “slow.”