The first episode of The Best of Us: Being Human in Sarasota aired February 2 2025. The hour-long show explores how the practice of repairing, making, or even viewing artworks is elemental to our human capacity for resilience, proving that the arts run deeper than superficial luxury. While Emily Brown will offer a personal perspective, George Prochnik will offer a history lesson from Vienna.

The local guest is Emily Brown Conservator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Before The Ringling, Brown completed a Mellon Fellowship at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a contract position at The Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and graduate internships at Shelburne Museum, The Fitzwilliam Museum, and The Walters Art Museum. She is a graduate of the Winterthur-University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation and is a recurring guest lecturer for the Program, teaching First-Year students about the history of glass manufacture. She gave a talk recently at The Ringling’s Wonder Symposium and shared how she was able to regain an experience of wonder in her work after the loss of her husband.

The topic guest of the episode is George Prochik, a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of five books of nonfiction including Stranger in a Strange Land, which was a New York Times editors’ choice and was short-listed for the 2018 Wingate Literary Prize in the UK. His previous book, The Impossible Exile, was shortlisted for the 2016 Wingate Literary Prize and won the National Jewish Book Award for Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir. Prochnik is also the author of In Pursuit of Silence, Putnam Camp, and Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bookforum, and Los Angeles Review of Books, and is editor at large for Cabinet magazine.