Time Sensitive The Slowdown

The French Moroccan creative director, artist, and entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami, the creator of Hotel Drei Berge in the Swiss Alps and the co-founder of the cult grooming brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803, talks about the parallels between Japan and Switzerland, the healing power of mountains, business as a religion, and his upcoming journey from Paris to Tokyo by car along the Southern Silk Road.

“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.