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Home Audio Episode 70: When Art Imitates Life

Michael Bierut, Jessica Helfand|Audio

November 30, 2017

Episode 70: When Art Imitates Life

In 1979, Michael was still living in Ohio when Woody Allen’s Manhattan came out, and

It just seemed like exactly everything I wanted out of life was in that opening sequence.

Now Manhattan — a movie in which Allen’s character dates a high-school student, and a movie that Louis C.K. refers back to in his unreleased film I Love You Daddy, looks very different. Michael asks:

Do you think somehow these guys who have these urges that they somehow know are wrong, they use their art in order to normalize what they’re doing? If I can get people to see this and accept it as a thing, then it makes the underlying urges, it offers me a measure of forgiveness and acceptance and all that, because I’m not hiding and it’s out in the open.

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Thanks to Simplehuman for sponsoring this episode. Listen to the show for a discount code for the new sensor can with voice control.

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By Michael Bierut & Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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