Person Place Thing is produced with the JCC in Manhattan and sponsored by WAMC Northeast Public Radio in partnership with Humanities NY. Person Place Thing with Randy Cohen, is an interview show based on this idea: people are particularly engaging when they speak not directly about themselves but about something they care about. Guests talk about one person, one place, and one thing that are important to them. The result? Surprising stories from great talkers.

Michael Bierut is a partner in the New York office of the international design consultancy Pentagram, where his work includes brand identity, book design, packaging, and environmental graphics. His clients at Pentagram have included The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, The Robin Hood Foundation, MIT Media Lab, Mastercard, Bobby Flay Bold Foods, Princeton University, the New York Jets, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Playwrights Horizons. As a volunteer to Hillary Clinton’s communications team, he designed the H logo that was ubiquitous throughout the campaign.

Michael is on the faculty of the Yale School of Management and a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art. A book on his work, How to use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world, was published in 2015 by Harper Collins. His collection of new essays, Now You See It, was published in fall 2017.

Randy Cohen’s first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic, Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for Late Night with David Letterman for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on Michael Moore’s TV Nation. He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it. For twelve years he wrote “The Ethicist,” a weekly column for the The New York Times Magazine. His most recent book (an optimistic formulation) is Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything.

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