Sex & Violence – News Syndication

By BART ZIEGLER

Susan McWhinney for the Wall Street Journal

That’s me in my shade garden.

I’m starting to think that my yard and gardens are just too, well, ordinary.

Yes, I have way more shrubs and flower beds than normal people do but many of the plants I grow are run-of-the-Big-Box fare, things like daffodils and peonies and phlox. Unlike some expert gardeners I don’t have beds filled with exotic flora recently discovered by plant hunters in the Himalayas or the rain forests of Brazil.

Or maybe it’s all in my head and I’ve spent too much time lusting over the esoteric offerings in catalogs such as Plant Delights,
Heronswood, and Rare Find Nursery.

Tour the Garden

After all, after many seasons of futzing, I’m pretty pleased by how my enormous hillside shade garden has turned out—it’s at least 60 feet long and 15 feet deep. Yes, it is composed mainly of plants your grandparents may have grown: primroses and lady’s mantle, spiderworts and lungworts. (You’ve got to love those ancient names.) But I think I have found interesting ways to juxtapose and intermingle them. And I’ve looked for plants whose green leaves are spotted or outlined in yellow or white, which show up better in the shade. Long after these plants give up their flowers they still seem interesting.

On top of that I’ve gravitated toward variations in familiar plants. Though my shade garden has lots of standard bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis) with green leaves and red, heart-shaped flowers, I also have planted a newer variety called Gold Heart that has yellow stems and leaves. I love how they jump out amid all the green, especially in early spring when they are their most yellow.

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Susan McWhinney for the Wall Street Journal

Common bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis) in the front with a newer yellow-leafed variety called Gold Heart in the rear

Though I have many green-leafed ferns I also have groupings of Japanese painted ferns (Athyrium niponicum var. pictum), whose brownish, spiky leaves are streaked with white. I also grow a silver-leafed version of the common green-leaf brunnera called Jack Frost, which is particularly amazing-looking when its bright blue flowers are blooming, and a variety of spiderwort (Tradescantia) called Sweet Kate, whose own blue flowers stand out against its unusual bright yellow leaves instead of the typical green ones.

My mission to make my yard more creative goes beyond the shady spots. Last fall I ripped out several dozen of the common pink-purple coneflowers called Echinacea purpurea from my full-sun beds. I was simply tired of looking at them—you see them growing in so many yards and at every garden center. Instead, I’ve been planting a newer variety called Sunrise that has soft yellow flowers, an unexpected color for this plant.

Recently, my friend Tom has been helping me expand my plant horizons. Tom runs a business that installs and maintains homeowners’ gardens. In his own yard he shuns the standard plants that many of his customers favor. Instead, he has filled it with dozens of curious things you’d never find at a Home Depot or even at many independent garden centers.

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Susan McWhinney for the Wall Street Journal

These epimediums, with their red-edged leaves, draw the attention of people who visit. Silver-leafed brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ is peeping out behind.

The other week Tom gave me samples of an ancient woodland plant called Korean Fairy Bells (Disporum flavum), which has odd-shaped drooping yellow flowers on its tall stems. He also shared his Iris cristata, a dwarf member of the iris family that lives in shady areas and has small blue flowers, and a type of hardy geranium called Geranium phaeum ‘Samobor,’ whose notched green leaves have big purple blotches. To make room in my hillside garden I removed some of the common lungworts (Pulmonaria), which have a habit of self-seeding everywhere. (One of the great things about longtime gardeners is their willingness to share, both out of friendship and the need to thin out their ever-expanding perennials.)

Of course, part of the reason that advanced gardeners avoid common plants and tackle more finicky or unusual ones is a bit of one-upmanship—and snobbery. After all, if your brown-thumb neighbor can readily grow the hardy stuff he or she finds at Lowe’s—impatiens, daylilies, black-eyed susans–then there isn’t much to recommend the hobby. And real gardeners certainly don’t want their flower beds to resemble what they see decorating the median strip outside gas stations and the lawns of nursing homes.

But the appeal of unfamiliar plants goes beyond avoiding what the Joneses do. Gardening can be a window into nature’s oddities, and a travelog in your backyard. You may never take a trip to rural Korea, but you can grow a strange-looking plant that came from there.

Write to Bart Ziegler at bart.ziegler@wsj.com

By ANDY BATTAGLIA

Like many 21-year-olds, Nicolas Jaar spends part of his typical day cooped up in a college classroom, absorbing lectures and poring over strenuous texts by the likes of Jacques Derrida. Unlike most of his peers, though, he devotes certain of his nights to circulating a thrilling new kind of music—sensuous, suggestive, computer-commanded soul music—made and imagined in a realm all his own.

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Kevin Hagen for the Wall Street Journal

Brown University student Nicolas Jaar, center, rehearsed on Sunday with drummer Ian Sims and guitarist Dave Harrington in his Brooklyn studio.

Before he found his extraordinary sound, which he will perform live on Friday at (Le) Poisson Rouge, Mr. Jaar was a precocious teenager in Manhattan, where he was raised in a Nolita apartment (save for an early childhood stint in Chile). His father is the celebrated conceptual/installation artist Alfredo Jaar, whose politically charged work led the family on trips around the world. His mother, Evelyne Meynard, is a harbinger of eclectic tastes who once trained as a dancer in Merce Cunningham’s studio and who works now, in part, on an architectural line of “minimalist” mirrors.

“My parents were really supportive, as you can probably imagine,” Mr. Jaar said last week, taking a break from writing his final paper for the semester at a café in his old neighborhood. He was back in New York for a few days from Providence, R.I., where he studies comparative literature at Brown University among fellow matriculates only starting to learn of his formidable musical talents. They don’t have to dig too deep: His debut full-length album, “Space Is Only Noise,” has garnered rave reviews and serious attention from media outlets ranging from NPR to the BBC, and his burgeoning live show—having already graced stages at some of the biggest and best clubs in Europe—has shot him well beyond the electronic-music scene, where he began as an enterprising teenager just a few years ago.

“He was always an extremely curious kid,” Ms. Meynard said of her son, whom she remembered shooting photographs as a toddler in his stroller and later, in high school on the Upper East Side, writing a trenchant analysis of a John Cage poem. “He had a rush to do creative things. When he was a teenager he once told me, ‘I’ve already turned 17 and I’ve done nothing!’”

In the short time since, Mr. Jaar has crafted a unique sound that enlists the textures and rhythms of electronic dance-music in moody, melodic songs that trade propulsion for slow throbs of bass and mysterious singing that’s subjected to all manner of expressive manipulations. The music is very much technologically abetted, but the spirit of it remains grounded in earthy emotion, as well as the lightness of touch that Mr. Jaar learned from playing piano.

“I took two or three lessons to try to learn to play [the subtle French composer] Erik Satie,” Mr. Jaar said, “But I really hated knowing what to do. To know that certain notes went well together was beautiful but also frustrating, because it made a sound like everything else you hear. That stability was bizarre to me, so I tried to go back to instability by learning to make electronic music with a bunch of machines.”

When he was 17, he decided that some of his machine-made songs were worth sharing, so he brought them to an audience in Brooklyn, at one of a series of storied late-night loft parties thrown by the DJ duo Wolf + Lamb. Those parties, in a ramshackle Williamsburg building wryly named the Marcy Hotel, favor functional minimal-techno dance music and are known to go until 1 p.m. the next day. But Mr. Jaar played early—alongside the unusual site of a saxophone player.

“His sound is experimental, but he mastered making people move,” said Gadi Mizrahi, one of the Wolf + Lamb team that mentored Mr. Jaar at the start. “Even really slow and with not so many beats, he can make people dance. I don’t know how he does it, but that’s part of his magic. There’s a frenzy around him when he plays, with people almost crying.”

Indeed, while rehearsing Sunday afternoon for his homecoming show at (Le) Poisson Rouge, Mr. Jaar and his musicians—a sort of sci-fi lounge band featuring a drummer, a guitarist and a saxophonist, each of whom dabbles with various electronics as well—summoned an otherworldly range of emotions more multivalent than those typically evoked by electronic music heard in clubs.

“You can do stuff with machines and be like, ‘Oh, that’s so cool,’ but it actually just sounds like bad Kraftwerk,” Mr. Jaar said, referring to the German electronic-music pioneers. “My aesthetic is not like that. I don’t get too excited about the possibilities of gear because I just use it to get a sound I want. If I could make a recording that sounds like the backing tracks of Al Green with maybe a couple drum machines, I would be very happy.”

He said he will be happy, too, to continue balancing his life as an undergraduate with the roaming life of a touring musician—in his case one preparing to go back to Europe to play the sizable summer-festival circuit. “Going to school gives me access to my generation’s zeitgeist in both its frivolous nature and its heady, conceptual nature. It would be really sad to leave now. I want to keep some form of stability somewhere.”

Clint Spaulding/PatrickMcMullan.com

A musician outside the Stephen A. Schwarzman building.

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Clint Spaulding/PatrickMcMullan.com

Philip Roth and Dr. Judith Ginsberg

Maybe it was the speechifying. Maybe it was the red-ribboned medals many of the literary attendees wore around their necks. Maybe it’s just that time of year. But Monday’s Centennial Rededication Gala for the New York Public Library, celebrating, quite obviously, 100 years of the noble institution, now called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, felt a lot like a college graduation.

About 850 people, though it seemed like many more, gathered in the Rose Reading Room for a program celebrating the library. It was a mix of the literary (Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen), the social (Anna Wintour, Oscar and Annette de la Renta) and the financial (Pete Peterson and Mr. Schwarzman, of course). The evening raised $2.3 million.

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Clint Spaulding/PatrickMcMullan.com

Jonathan Franzen

Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” extolled the importance of not only “the books that were written here,” but also “the books that live here.”

Uzodinma Iweal, the 28-year-old writer of “Beasts of No Nation,” a novel that won him the Library Lions literary prize a few years ago, said, “I come here to mostly fall asleep and get woken up by security guards. But I’ve been on no less than four dates with people I’ve met at the library.”

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Clint Spaulding/PatrickMcMullan.com

Joan Ganz Cooney with Pete Peterson

Barbara Walters spoke about how advances in technology have changed the way we read, and wondered, “What will happen in 2111?”

Catie Marron, the chairman of the board of trustees at the library, gave Mayor Bloomberg a piece of the building’s original marble. Then, Toni Morrison eloquently announced: “Access to knowledge is the supreme act of truly great civilizations.” Within those civilizations, “free libraries stand virtually alone. No committee decides who will enter. No oath is sworn. No visa is demanded.” Well, you get the idea.

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Clint Spaulding/PatrickMcMullan.com

Dr. Paul LeClerc and Elizabeth Rohatyn

This gala Monday was so big that one singing group wasn’t enough. There were three: the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, the Abyssinian Baptist Choir and, best received of all, the singing children of PS 22, those YouTube sensations who have covered songs by such contemporary hit makers as Lady Gaga, Mumford and Sons and Lykke Li. At the centennial, they segued into an old sawhorse: John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Dinner was served in a variety of corridors and special collection rooms. Candles were everywhere. So were live musicians, though there were probably more candles than live musicians. We found ourselves in the Salomon Room staring right into a 1971 oil painting (by James Whitney Fosburgh) of Truman Capote, an appropriate guardian, it would seem, as the family style dishes (de rigeur these days at galas) came out of the kitchen.

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Clint Spaulding/PatrickMcMullan.com

Toni Morrison

When the petits fours were served—many of them mini white cakes with “100″ iced in gold—guests began to move down into Astor Hall. A band and a large group of singers were performing oldies like “Johnny Be Good” and “You Can’t Hurry Love.”

As usual, Mr. Schwarzman and his wife, Christine, were very active on the dance floor, especially to the Stevie Wonder song “Higher Ground.” (“Gonna keep on tryin’/Till I reach my highest ground.”) If you can’t get down at a party basically in your honor in a historic building named after you, where can you get down?

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Clint Spaulding/PatrickMcMullan.com

Robert and Ina Caro

Meanwhile, outside, William Close was playing the Earth Harp, a 170-foot-long instrument made of brass cords. The massive surfaces of the library provided the resonating field, so the sound, according to a spokeswoman, “was actually produced by the cords interacting with our building.”

Was the instrument hard to learn? “Well, I invented it,” Mr. Close said.

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Clint Spaulding/PatrickMcMullan.com

Stephen and Christine Schwarzman

Nearby, there was also a lion made out of gray Legos. “How long do you think that took to put together?” asked Anthony Marx, the incoming president of the library. “A long time I bet.”

In the midst of all of this action, the Schwarzmans paused to take a photograph on the steps of the library with a large group of family and friends. The lighting (by Claude R. Engle) was beautiful, Ms. Schwarzman’s dress was a lovely hue of blue, and Mr. Schwarzman’s name on the building was large and visible. A young woman used her iPhone to take a few impromptu shots and as quickly as they had assembled, they had dispersed.

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Clint Spaulding/PatrickMcMullan.com

David Remnick, Gayfryd Steinberg

“Well, everybody’s over that,” Ms. Schwarzman said, referring to the photograph. And so they went home.

By DENNIS NISHI

Full name: James Balog

Age: 57

Hometown: Watchung, N.J.

Current position: Nature photographer

First job: Wilderness camp counselor in Maine

Favorite job: This one

Education: B.A. Communications and Secondary Education, Boston College; M.A. Geography with a specialty in Geomorphology, University of Colorado

Years in the industry: 32

How I got to here in 10 words or less: I did what I knew would work for me.

Adam LeWinter

James Balog’s love of mountaineering led to a new career.

After studying geography in college, James Balog embarked on a nature-photography career that merged his love of mountaineering, science and art. It is an aesthetic reflected in the work he has done for publications like the New Yorker, Smithsonian and National Geographic. He also has published seven books of photography. Mr. Balog has photographed everything from nuclear missile silos throughout the agrarian West to figure studies of chimps. His latest project, “Extreme Ice Survey,” is a time-lapse, photographic record of climate change as seen through glacial melting at 15 sites in the northern hemisphere. Edited excerpts follow.

Q: Your work often explores the relationship between humans and nature. How did this interest develop?

A: I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a transitional area that was surrounded by farmland that wasn’t being cultivated. It took me 50 years to realize that living in that border zone was key to informing my thinking in my adult life. I had to live in that duality that’s between nature and civilization in order to do what I’ve done as a photographer.

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James Balog

High tide brings an endless procession of ice fragments into the beach in Jokulsarlon, Iceland. These “ice diamonds” are unique sculptures created as the glacier fragments tumble in the surf and on the sand. They will vanish during the next high tide.

Q: Is that what led to your interest in geomorphology—and what exactly is that?

A: I was a communications major but was always interested in how the tectonics [the study of the earth's crust] worked and how the land is shaped. That’s geomorphology. I studied it as a junior and ended up going to graduate school, figuring I’d end up working with consulting companies that did environmental-impact statements.

Q: What detoured you from that career path?

A: By the time I finished my dissertation, it was clear that science was moving toward a heavy emphasis on statistics and computer modeling. I didn’t want to spend my career sitting in front of a computer screen doing mathematical models.

Q: Is that when you decided to pick up the camera?

A: I actually started writing stories. I did a bunch of spec work—mostly for small publications where I also included my photos. One of my first major paid assignments was writing for Geo magazine on oil and shale development during the Carter [administration] years. My first paid assignment for photography was shortly afterward for Smithsonian magazine; it was on avalanche control. Within a year, I was shooting for Time and Life magazines.

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James Balog

Icebergs 200 feet tall, formerly part of the Greenland Ice Sheet, float into the North Atlantic Ocean, raising sea levels as they melt.

Q: At what point did your interests in nature and photography begin to merge and manifest in your work?

A: I started studying black and white concern photographers—guys that were photographing drug addicts and prostitutes. I realized there was nobody looking at nature [in the same way]. I thought that there was a lot to be said about the conflict between humans and nature.

Q: Your first book “Wildlife Requiem” was pretty graphic and shocked some critics. What were you trying to accomplish with that series?

A: It was a study of big-game hunting in the Rockies. They’re bloody pictures and gruesome. You look at them and think and think this guy must have been inspired by war photography. War photography had a long tradition of turning a glass eye onto horror and ugliness. I wanted to do the same here.

Q: You then started photographing portraits of animals. That seems to take a completely different tack from Requiem.

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James Balog

Near the Ilulissat Isfjord, Greenland, March 2008. A massive iceberg broken off the Greenland Ice Sheet, surrounded by lily pads of sea ice, in the process of breaking up at the edge of Disko Bay.

A: I was doing a job for Geographic on endangered wildlife when the idea for the book “Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife” hit. There was this magnificent rhino at the San Diego Wild Animal Park staring at me, and I thought we’ve been looking at animals the wrong way. We always look for picturesque places to photograph them that make it look like they have these idyllic lives. Looking up close made me realize that this species is almost extinct. I wanted to put them in a setting that showed the alienation of that species from nature. That led to years of pictures of animals in front of artificial backgrounds with strobe lights.

Q: Were rhinos a difficult subject to work up close with?

A: Mostly they were curious about me and all this stuff I brought into their world, which is pretty boring. We stood there eyeball to eyeball studying each other for 20 minutes and that’s when I realized, ‘This isn’t just a cabbage. There’s a mind in there that’s forming opinions, ideas.’ You can’t see any of this with a telephoto lens from far away.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for “Extreme Ice Survey”?

A: The New Yorker asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn’t the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it’s dying. That idea gestated in my mind for a year and eventually turned into the “Extreme Ice Survey” in 2006.

Q: How do images of glaciers collapsing bring the idea of climate change home?

A: There were a lot of repeat photos that showed glaciers retreating over a hundred years. That’s pretty abstract. I wanted to show a shorter term time lapse that would make people think, “My god, little Emily was in first grade in April and she’s in second grade in October. I remember this. It’s happening in my life.”

Q: How much longer do you plan to keep the project going?

A: We’re almost at three years now. Four if you include the New Yorker and National Geographic story. We’ve decided to keep the cameras alive for another year or two—or until the money runs out.

Write to Dennis Nishi at cjeditor@dowjones.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A27

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Patrick McMullan

Cameron Payne and Spike Lee

The youth division of the Points of Life Institute, generationOn, on Thursday honored Laurie M. Tisch, Spike Lee and his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner and six young philanthropists ranging in ages between 7 and 17, who were dubbed Community Action Heroes. The evening raised more than $900,000.

Silda Wall Spitzer founded generationOn, which promotes volunteerism in children, 15 years ago.

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Owen Hoffman/Patrick Mcmullan

Margi and Kevin Arquit

Mrs. Spitzer, in a figure-snugging white dress, admired her husband’s blue, iridescent tie. When Eliot Spitzer was asked if he’d had any philanthropic impulses as a child, he said, “I don’t want to pretend that I did. I was a typical kid.”

The kids at this event were not typical at all. Max Wallack, 15, from Natick, Mass., is the founder of PuzzlesToRemember, which has collected more than 7,000 puzzles and distributed them to elderly patients with Alzheimer’s.

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Owen Hoffman/Patrick Mcmullan

Barbara and Brian Goldner

In the past two years, Riley Hebbard, from Mechanicsburg, Pa., has shipped 18,000 toys to Lesotho, Zambia and Zimbabwe. She’s 7 years old.

But these children aren’t just kind-hearted. They’re pint-size power brokers, each with his or her own website, business card and polished pitch.

“I don’t even have a card,” said Sigourney Weaver.

Perhaps the inimitable Mr. Lee had displayed comparable philanthropic impulses.

“No,” he said, “as a kid in Brooklyn, I was just trying to get another piece of candy.”

—Lizzie Simon

By DENNIS NISHI

Corrections & Amplifications

Sara Mast turned her love of documentary film into a career in reality television. She began by taking a low-paying production job to make ends meet. Now she’s an executive producer for “The Hills,” an MTV reality show that follows the personal lives of a fashion-design student and her friends. It’s one of the top rated reality shows among 12-to-34 year-olds. Dennis Nishi spoke with Ms. Mast about what it takes to succeed in Hollywood. Edited excerpts follow.

Full name: Sara Mast
Hometown: Minnetonka, Minn.
Current position: Reality show producer
First job: Pizza cook
Favorite job: This one
Education: B.A. in Women’s Studies, Mt. Holyoke College; M.A. Screenwriting, American Film Institute
Years in the industry: 16
How I got to here in 10 words or less: Passion, drive, determination and luck

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John Malvino

Sara Mast

Q. Did you go to film school?

A. I went to Mt. Holyoke, a woman’s college in South Hadley, Mass. They didn’t have a film program, but I was able to take experimental film courses at Hampshire College nearby. The funny thing I learned while making these avant-garde films was that I was way more interested in traditional narrative and documentary, things that told a clear story.

Q. What did you want to do in film and how did you get started?

A. I decided I wanted to make an impact and documentary was where I thought I could make a change in the world, so I made a few environmental documentaries. After graduating in 1990, I moved to San Francisco. I started dating a guy at the time that introduced me to somebody that worked under Henry Selick, director of “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Through that contact I was able to wangle an internship with Disney. I also worked as a picture framer for two shops for $5.75 an hour.

Q. Is that how most people get into the industry?

A. People think they’re going to graduate from film school and be a director. It doesn’t work that way unless you’re a rare breakout genius. If you don’t have a lot of contacts, starting at the bottom is one of the few ways to get in. I spent what seemed like years on the edge of a financial abyss.

Q. How do you distinguish yourself when doing menial tasks like getting coffee or sweeping floors?

A. It was my eagerness to do whatever was asked without question. I also had an interest in camera and lighting and so I worked for free on some other small productions. So I also apprenticed in the camera department. And I found somebody who mentored me. I kept asking him a lot of questions until he saw that I had a passion for the work, and so did he. That helped my career a lot.

Q. How long did it take you to move into a paying gig?

A. After a year, I became a production assistant and then soon after a camera assistant in San Francisco, where a lot of cutting edge special effects shops were. Over the course of (the job) I got really educated doing camera work for “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “James and the Giant Peach.” I also worked on the Robin Williams film “What Dreams May Come” as well as a few other movie and television shows. I moved to Los Angeles seven years later and went to grad school and got my master’s in screenwriting. I wanted to round out my experience and knowing screenwriting helped me understand story and structure. I continued to make shorts. My film “Big Issue” went to Sundance in 2002.

Q. How did you make the jump to reality television?

A. Despite all of this work, I was still poor and struggling. I had just done a couple of documentaries, including one on taxidermy called “Stuffed.” When reality television broke out, they were in need of people that had done that sort of narrative and documentary work.

Q. Did you see it as an extension of documentary work?

A. I saw reality television as this kind of anthropology of modern culture. I’ve always been fascinated by what makes people tick.

Q. You got your first reality show job on Craigslist. Explain.

A. Yeah, I kind of fibbed to get into the door. I wrote “reality TV is my life,” on my cover letter which would later become true. Truth is, I didn’t have much experience in TV, and I needed to pay the bills. The job was for the Learning Channel, and they hired me to work on a show called “Faking It.”

Q. How did you parlay that to get onto “The Hills?”

A. I worked on a bunch of different shows over six or seven years including “Wife Swap,” “Vacation Swap,” “Supernanny” and “Ice-T’s Rap School.” When I finally got an agent, he asked if I wanted to interview for an associate producer job on an MTV reality show. Three or four interviews later, they offered me the job. What clinched it was all of my production experience. I had done every job on the set.

Q. What’s your schedule like when you’re documenting the private lives of people? Are you afraid you’ll miss something if you take time off to be with your family?

A. The thing with reality TV is when reality happens, you have to go cover it. That includes some weekends and holidays. So I’m always scrambling to assemble a crew. I’m chained to my Blackberry.

Q. Critics generally fault reality programming for being overly scripted and set up. What kind of planning goes into “The Hills?”

A. It’s like pinball. We set up the game and the balls are going to go where they’re going to go. It’s my job to predict where they end up. Things are generally pretty predictable. We were at a bar last season and a boyfriend of one of the characters was flirting with another girl. There was an argument and they both stormed out into the parking lot behind the bar. We were not at all prepared for that, so here I am yelling at the crew to get cameras, lights and audio out the door and to find them. They were by the dumpsters crying. It ended up being a turning point.

Q. Do you ever worry about crossing a line to achieve an outcome?

A. There’s certainly some moral ambiguity. And you sometimes ask yourself if what you’re doing is right. At the same time, I have to be able to wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror so there are limits that I stay within.

Q. Do you feel you’ve broken some gender barriers getting to where you are?

A. There’s not a lot of women producers and directors. But because reality TV hit so fast, many smart and talented women were able to cross over. I was one of the first woman executive producers on “The Hills.”

Q. What’s your job like these days?

A. It’s busy and exciting. Sometimes I feel half my job is being part psychotherapist to the people and part field marshal to the crew.

Q. Where do you see yourself going with this?

A. I’d eventually like my own show. I love working in this genre. It’s sort of a hybrid that’s blurring the fine line between narrative and reality. And though some of the shows I’ve worked on have less societal value than others, I think entertaining people is a positive thing.

Write to Dennis Nishi at cjeditor@dowjones.com

• Find television listings at LocateTV.

Corrections & Amplifications

Ms. Mast graduated from Mt. Holyoke, a woman’s college in South Hadley, Mass. An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the school’s location.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D8