Past LIVE Programs

Go the F**k to Sleep, a pants-wettingly funny bedtime book for parents, has received an extraordinary amount of pre-publication attention from parents around the world. As Peter Maravelis of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco told the New York Times: “It’s the zeitgeist.”

Go the F**k to Sleep author Adam Mansbach, illustrator Ricardo Cortés, and Special Guests in conversation with Paul Holdengräber on Children, Sleep Deprivation and Insomnia.

ADAM MANSBACH novels include The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award, and the best-selling Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Believer, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He is the 2010-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University. His daughter, Vivien, is three.

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Established in the early 18th century, Russia’s first Kunstkammer triggered a profound debate over religious and existential questions. The Orthodox Church, faced with a collection of Cyclopes, Siamese twins, and creatures that looked like lions or leprechauns, could not justify nature’s unsuccessful attempts at human life and deemed their souls lost: they could not go to heaven, hell or limbo–they were dead on arrival and had nowhere to go.

This program has been canceled. All tickets will be refunded. Please contact live@nypl.org or 212 930 0855 with questions.

Challenging the events of the gospels in his latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman puts forward a compelling and plausible version of the life of Jesus. The story Pullman tells comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like history, and parts like a fairy tale; it is a story about how stories become stories.

 
Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England, in 1946. His awards include the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Pullman's acclaimed trilogy, His Dark Materials has been published in thirty-nine languages.

In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies.  An honest story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work—from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.

Tickets go on sale April 9th at 11am.

Parrot and Olivier is Peter Carey’s most recent novel, set in early 19th century America. Olivier— an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville—is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver.

They are born on different sides of history, but their lives are joined by an enigmatic one-armed marquis...

Through Parrot and Olivier, Peter Carey explores the adventure of American democracy in conversation with Claire Messud and Edmund White.

Almost immediately upon its publication in 1759, Voltaire's Candide was translated, pirated, and responded to in pamphlets, unauthorized sequels, and adaptations for stage. Since its first explosive appearance, Candide has traveled widely: to 1960s counterculture, to Broadway, to a science fiction future, and most recently, to The New York Public Library’s landmark exhibition, Candide at 250: Scandal and Success (closing April 25, 2010).

ASL interpretation,  Realtime (CART) captioning, and assistive listening devices will be provided. 

PART I. ON THE PURSUIT OF SILENCE IN A NOISY WORLD

GEORGE PROCHNIK in conversation with Paul Holdengräber

“Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.”
             -Veteran congressman and civil-rights leader John Lewis

Obama’s election as the first African-American President came at the end of a personal journey that intersected with the history of race in American politics.

George Carlin is remembered for his unique and quintessentially New York voice, his coruscating mastery of the English language and his devastatingly funny insights into such timeless human follies as war, class, moral hypocrisy, God and golf.

       
Live from the NYPL presents an evening to honor the publication of George Carlin's posthumous “sortabiography” Last Words (written with Tony Hendra).

Whoopi Goldberg will host an eclectic gathering of comedic and cultural icons and friends who come together to celebrate George Carlin’s life, art, extraordinary half-century in comedy and broad cultural influence with readings, anecdotes, memories, personal tributes as well nostalgic selections from some of the greatest performance art of the 20th century - by the guest of honor himself.

In Collaboration with The Metropolitan Opera

Paul Holdengräber hosts William Kentridge, in a conversation about Gogol, Shostakovich, and Kentridge’s creative process.

In The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the explorers of “dynamic science,” of an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. This age of exploration extended to great writers and poets as well as scientists, all creators relishing in moments of high exhilaration, boundary-pushing, and discovery. Holmes shows how great ideas and experiments—both successes and failures—were born of singular and often lonely dedication, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide.

Richard Holmes is the author of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer; Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage, Shelley: The Pursuit, Coleridge: Early Visions and Coleridge: Darker Reflections. He lives in England.

KRISTA TIPPETT & ANDREW SOLOMON
Einstein's God: Conversations about Science
Instigated by Paul Holdengräber

At the opening of André Aciman's new novel, Eight White Nights, a young woman introduces herself to the unnamed narrator by saying, “I am Clara” setting in motion an obsession with this fascinating and unreachable woman. Meeting every evening over the following seven days at the same cinema in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, they both navigate the desire to ask for and to express love as their relationship becomes all the more intense and enigmatic.

André Aciman is the author of Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project. He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

In BOMB POWER: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills reveals how the atomic bomb transformed our nation down to its deepest constitutional roots—by dramatically increasing the power of the modern presidency and redefining the government as a national security state. The bomb forever changed the institution of the presidency since only the president controls “the button” and, by extension, the fate of the world. Garry Wills casts the history of the postwar period in a new light and sounds an alarm about the continued threat to our Constitution.

The Art and Soul of The Velvet Underground

In the historic ferment of Sixties rock, the Velvet Underground were the perfect band in the right city, New York, at a crucial time.

For five years 1965 to 1970 singer-songwriter and guitarist Lou Reed, bassist and viola player John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker, with the German vocalist Nico and bassist Doug Yule (who replaced Cale in 1968), broadcast the real life of their home town the sex, drugs and art; the furious street energies, hidden pleasures and desperate romance in an unprecedented pop music of vivid storytelling and transgressive excitement.

Admired by Bolaño, Ashbery, Sebald, and Coetzee, Javier Marías is widely considered one of Spain's greatest living writers. Poison, Shadow, and Farewell brings to a close Marías's three-part novel Your Face Tomorrow.

With its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes Jacques Deza back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss.

Chronicling her journey from Cold War Budapest where her family was deemed "Enemies of the People," accomplished journalist Kati Marton speaks with renowned filmmaker, Volker Schlondörff (The Tin Drum and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum)about opening Pandora's box when requesting her family's secret police files in Budapest.

Against the background of one of the Soviet occupations of Eastern Europe, Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America is a story of love and survival.

LIVE from the NYPL presents an evening with director WES ANDERSON (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) in conversation with screenplay co-writer NOAH BAUMBACH (The Squid and the Whale) about Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson's first animated film. In Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson utilizes classic handmade stop-motion techniques to tell the story of the classic children's book by ROALD DAHL.

Mr. and Mrs. Fox (George Clooney and Meryl Streep) live an idyllic home life with their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) and visiting young nephew Kristofferson (Eric Anderson). But after twelve years of quiet domesticity, the bucolic existence proves too much for Mr. Fox’s wild animal instincts. Soon he slips back into his old ways as a sneaky chicken thief and in doing so, endangers not only his beloved family, but the whole animal community...

Restaurant critic and author William Grimes, joined by Editor in Chief of Gourmet Magazine Ruth Reichl and others, illuminates the fascinating culinary history of New York by describing how restaurant life has changed over the years.

Ilan Stavans, A native from Mexico and author of The Hispanic Condition, On Borrowed Words, Love and Language, and other books will be in conversation with Barbara Kingsolver about her most recent book, The Lacuna, a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Barbara Kingsolver illuminates an era when bold internationalism gave way to a postwar landscape narrowly defined as Americanism. The Lacuna crosses two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the color Red.

About Barbara Kingsolver

What will the American economic system look like in the months and years ahead? Who are the innovators currently shaping the future? And what will be the role of business in that future?

President of the Aspen Institute, Walter Isaacson invites Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, Indra Nooyi, Chair and CEO of Pepsico, Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Google, and Nassim Taleb, scholar of randomness and risk, literary essayist, and derivatives trader, to consider the issues in the media and on the public mind.

About Niall Ferguson

This American Life host Ira Glass talks with writer Etgar Keret about his short fiction and films, runaway piggy banks, bus drivers and other, lesser gods.

This event is co-sponsored by Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel in New York.

About Ira Glass

For 35 years, Creative Time has been committed to groundbreaking new models in art-making that actively engages with and transforms the world around us. Over 40 international artists and critics whose work continues to have an impact on the world, including Thomas Hirschorn, The Yes Men, Suzanne Lacy, and Alfredo Jaar will make short, pointed, and dynamic presentations on their work and art and social justice in the public sphere.

Morris Dickstein, author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression will offer a homily on the challenges and opportunities artists and critics faced in the Great Depression and are confronted with today.

For 35 years, Creative Time has been committed to groundbreaking new models in art-making that actively engages with and transforms the world around us. Over 40 international artists and critics whose work continues to have an impact on the world, including Thomas Hirschorn, The Yes Men, Suzanne Lacy, and Alfredo Jaar will make short, pointed, and dynamic presentations on their work and art and social justice in the public sphere.

Morris Dickstein, author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression will offer a homily on the challenges and opportunities artists and critics faced in the Great Depression and are confronted with today.

World-renowned choreographer William Forsythe and cognitive scientist Alva Noë, author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, examine consciousness as a kind of dance. Together they will explore Noë’s assertion that consciousness is not something that happens inside of us, in our brains, or anywhere else. It is something we do, in our active engagement with the world.

About Alva Noë
Alva Noë is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences. His previous book, Action in Perception, was published in 2004.

About William Forsythe

Over the past few seasons, Met General Manager Peter Gelb has enlisted some of the world's greatest directors to heighten the theatricality of Met productions. Two of the finest, Bartlett Sher and Patrice Chéreau, will join Gelb for a conversation on opera, theater, and the art of directing. Sher, who won a Tony Award for his direction of South Pacific, made his Met debut in 2006 with an acclaimed new staging of Il Barbiere di Siviglia. He returns to the Met this season with a new production of Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann. Chéreau makes his long-awaited U.S. opera debut this season with a new production of Janácek's From the House of the Dead the staging caused a sensation when it premiered in Europe in 2007. Paul Holdengräber instigates a conversation with these two visionary directors and the man who brought them to the Met.

Known for his acclaimed albums Love Is Hell, Jacksonville, City Nights, Easy Tiger, Heartbreaker, and Gold, alt-country/rock singer and songwriter Ryan Adams discusses poetry and fiction, and his most recent book HelloSunshine with Tony Award winning actress Mary-Louise Parker.
This program is co-presented by Akashic Books.Akashic Books.

Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster whether natural or manmade so many people suddenly become altruistic, resilient, resourceful, and brave, stirred and motivated by a newfound sense of community and purpose? Rebecca Solnit shows how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind, and how the social connectedness that subsequently arises can help lead us to a new vision of what society could become one that is more collaborative, cooperative, and local. Solnit's narrative travels through five major North American disasters, from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco and the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax,Nova Scotia, to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture.
Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks examines how the normal brain, if deprived of perceptual input, may generate illusory sensations as with the visual hallucinations of the blind, or the musical hallucinations of the deaf.

This event is also sponsored by Sutherland.

About Oliver Sacks

Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas Festival

ISLAM IN EUROPE—Insult: Fractured States? is a three-evening symposium on June 9, 10, and 11 that gathers prominent, cross-sector speakers from diverse disciplines and the Muslim diaspora to share country-specific perspectives on Muslim communities’ integration in European society.

In five events, ISLAM IN EUROPE sets the context for and explores multiple perspectives for viewing relations between European societies and their Muslim communities. Participants will examine how different European nations and the Muslim diasporas within their borders consider immediate local issues, as well as look at the development of a Europe-wide discourse. The program also offers opportunities to bring American voices into this dialogue and is aimed at identifying opportunities for cross-cultural understanding and cooperation.

Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas Festival

ISLAM IN EUROPE Insult: Fractured States? is a three-evening symposium on June 9, 10, and 11 that gathers prominent, cross-sector speakers from diverse disciplines and the Muslim diaspora to share country-specific perspectives on Muslim communities integration in European society.

In five events, ISLAM IN EUROPE sets the context for and explores multiple perspectives for viewing relations between European societies and their Muslim communities. Participants will examine how different European nations and the Muslim diasporas within their borders consider immediate local issues, as well as look at the development of a Europe-wide discourse. The program also offers opportunities to bring American voices into this dialogue and is aimed at identifying opportunities for cross-cultural understanding and cooperation.

Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas Festival

ISLAM IN EUROPE Insult: Fractured States? is a three-evening symposium on June 9, 10, and 11 that gathers prominent, cross-sector speakers from diverse disciplines and the Muslim diaspora to share country-specific perspectives on Muslim communities’ integration in European society.

In five events, ISLAM IN EUROPE sets the context for and explores multiple perspectives for viewing relations between European societies and their Muslim communities. Participants will examine how different European nations and the Muslim diasporas within their borders consider immediate local issues, as well as look at the development of a Europe-wide discourse. The program also offers opportunities to bring American voices into this dialogue and is aimed at identifying opportunities for cross-cultural understanding and cooperation.

Through scholarly debate, the related voices of participants of ISLAM IN EUROPE will articulate new perspectives offering insight into the ideas that shape policy and thought.

Part I, June 9, 7:00 pm
Opening Event: How Did We Get Here?
Part II, June 10, 6:00 pm
Migration Policy, Response and Reaction: The Status Quo
Part III, June 10, 7:30 pm
Youth: The Future
Part IV, June 11, 5:00 pm
Media: A Catalyst For Change
Part V, June 11, 7:00 pm
Conclusions: Where Do We Go From Here?

PART III YOUTH: THE FUTURE

This debate investigates how young people, as Western citizens who are fully confident in their Muslim identities, tackle thorny societal issues and challenge old paradigms, and discuss how young people can play an integral role in creating a better, socially coherent future.

Moustafa Bayoumi, City University of New York, moderator

Special guests panelists include Nanna Westh (filmmaker, Denmark), Farid Hafez (University of Vienna, Austria), Ziyah Gafic (Photographer, Bosnia-Hercegovina), and respondents, Nebojša Šeric Shoba (visual artist, Bosnia-Hercegovina) and Krzysztof Czyzewski (Borderland Foundation, Poland).

About Moustafa Bayoumi

Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. Born in Switzerland and raised in Canada, he is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader and has published academic essays in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Amerasia, Arab Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Asian American Studies, and other places. His writings have also appeared in The Nation and The London Review of Books. He is currently an editor for Middle East Report.

About Krzysztof Czyzewski

Krzysztof Czyzewski is a social activist, theater producer, essayist, and publisher, and the founder and president of the Borderlands Foundation (Fundacja Pogranicze) in Sejny, Poland. In 1990, the Borderlands Foundation was founded to memorialize, rebuild, and sustain the rich cultural diversity in Central and Eastern Europe. Czyzewski has brought the Foundation's model to regions of ethnic tension around the world. Since 2003 he has been an active member of the European Culture Parliament and in 2008 he served as Polish Ambassador to the European Commission's European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.

About Farid Hafez

Farid Hafez works at the Institute of Philosophy of Law, Law of Religion, and Culture in Austria and studies at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Vienna. Hafez is also the co-editor of the first volume of Islamophobia in Austria. Hafez teaches at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Vienna on "Islam in Austria". In 1996, Hafez co-founded the Muslim Youth Organization and is frequently interviewed by the Austrian media on issues related to the life of Muslims in Austria.

About Ziyah Gafic

Ziyah Gafic is a photographer based in Sarajevo. His most recent exhibition, “Troubled Islam: Short stories from Troubled Societie,” presented in Beacon, NY, is a series of photo essays on the aftermath of war and violence in the daily lives of people living from Bosnia to Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran and Iraq. He is the author of the book Muslims of New York. He regularly contributes to The New York Times Magazine, TIME, Liberation, and Le Monde, among others. His work has also been exhibited worldwide at such places as London Tom Blau Gallery and New York "Fovea editions" gallery.

About Nebojša Šeric Shoba

Nebojša Šeric Shoba is a visual artist who has shown work most recently at Warlord, Smith Stewart Gallery, New York; “Neo Constructivism: Art, Architecture & Activism,” Rutger’s Paul Robeson Gallery and NJ School of Architecture Gallery, Newark; “Now is the winter,” Proekt_Fabrika, Moscow, Russia; and “Greater New York,” P.S 1/MoMA, New York. His work has also been exhibited in the Venice Bienalle, Italy. His work has appeared in “Political Minimalism” by Claus Biesenbach, in Flash Art Magazine.

About Nanna Westh

Nanna Westh is a screenwriter and documentarist for television. She wrote the script for the Danish TV-series Yallahrup Færgeby about two preteens, Ali and Hassan, and their endeavours to succeed in the suburban ghetto and become “real gangstas.” Westh has previously worked for the Danish Public Broadcaster DR for seven years, making documentaries for television and radio.

Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas is a celebration of the extraordinary range of artistic expression in the Muslim world, co-presented by Asia Society, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and New York University Center for Dialogues during June 5 - 14.

This event is sponsored by European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC).

This event is in partnership with Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas.

Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas Festival

ISLAM IN EUROPE Insult: Fractured States? is a three-evening symposium on June 9, 10, and 11 that gathers prominent, cross-sector speakers from diverse disciplines and the Muslim diaspora to share country-specific perspectives on Muslim communities’ integration in European society.

In five events, ISLAM IN EUROPE sets the context for and explores multiple perspectives for viewing relations between European societies and their Muslim communities. Participants will examine how different European nations and the Muslim diasporas within their borders consider immediate local issues, as well as look at the development of a Europe-wide discourse. The program also offers opportunities to bring American voices into this dialogue and is aimed at identifying opportunities for cross-cultural understanding and cooperation.

Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas Festival

ISLAM IN EUROPE Insult: Fractured States? is a three-evening symposium on June 9, 10, and 11 that gathers prominent, cross-sector speakers from diverse disciplines and the Muslim diaspora to share country-specific perspectives on Muslim communities integration in European society.

In five events, ISLAM IN EUROPE sets the context for and explores multiple perspectives for viewing relations between European societies and their Muslim communities. Participants will examine how different European nations and the Muslim diasporas within their borders consider immediate local issues, as well as look at the development of a Europe-wide discourse. The program also offers opportunities to bring American voices into this dialogue and is aimed at identifying opportunities for cross-cultural understanding and cooperation.

We spend much of our lives at work but surprisingly little is written about what makes work both one of the most exciting and most painful of all our activities.

London-based author Alain de Botton explores the joys and perils of the modern workplace. In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he wonders about what other people get up to all day and night to make the frenzied contemporary world function. He looks at an eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art, in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.

In discussion with Paul Holdengräber, de Botton will address the questions we all ask of our work:

Five writers, Peter Theroux, Raja Alem, Tom McDonough, Muhammed Al Mur, and Joe Sacco, Arab and American, who have taken innovative approaches to portraying the Arab World to an American audience discuss the challenges they have faced and the successes they have achieved in breaking down the barriers of fear and prejudice through their work. Journalist and writer Sulaiman Al Hattlan will moderate.

Whether through travelogue, memoir, graphic novel, children's literature or translation, these writers have widened the lens and sharpened the focus of American readers' view, setting a new precedent for sensitivity, creativity and insight in literature about the Arab World.

Adam Gopnik, author of Angels & Ages, A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life and Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and many other works, will discuss a fundamental question: How far can Darwin take us as a guide to why we are the way we are?

Both outspoken appreciators of Darwin, Adam Gopnik and Steven Pinker will compare their visions—perhaps complementary, perhaps contrasting—of what Darwin’s legacy is on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth.

About Adam Gopnik

Los Angeles conquers New York as two towering California artists, the architect Frank Gehry and the composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, discuss their work.

Frank Gehry is a transformative figure in the world of architecture. His Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, has been called "the world's most celebrated new building" by The New York Times, and his Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, is considered both a visual and an acoustical masterpiece. Projects from Las Vegas to Abu Dhabi are in the works or preparing to open. Having recently celebrated his eightieth birthday, Gehry talks to Barbara Isenberg, author of Conversations with Frank Gehry, and New Yorker music critic Alex Ross about his art of moving forms.

Once in a while an orchestra is lucky enough to form a partnership with a conductor who not only leads great performances but becomes a shaping force in music history. Since 1992, the brilliant Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen has made the Los Angeles Philharmonic the most interesting orchestra in America; since 2003, Disney Hall has been his musical home. Fresh from his final concert as LA's music director, Salonen talks to Alex Ross about his tenure in LA, his friendship with Gehry, Stravinsky, Radiohead, his own works, and the future of music.

About Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry's architectural career has spanned five decades and produced public and private buildings in America, Europe, and Asia. Notable projects include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the DZ Bank Building in Berlin; Nationale- Nederlanden Building in Prague; and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California. Projects under construction include the Beekman Residential Tower located in New York City, which will be Gehry's first high rise building to be completed.

About Barbara Isenberg

Barbara Isenberg is the author of Conversations with Frank Gehry, which reflects her interviews with the architect over the past 20 years. Other books include Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical and State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work. Founder and host of the Getty Center's Art Matters public interviews, she is currently Associate Director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at the University of Southern California.

About Alex Ross

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. From 1992 to 1996 he wrote for The New York Times. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

About Esa-Pekka Salonen

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Finnish conductor and composer, is Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a position he will hold until summer 2009. He was recently appointed Principal Conductor of London's Philharmonia and began his tenure in September 2008. Salonen is renowned for his interpretations of contemporary music and has given countless premieres of new as well as his own works. He has led critically acclaimed festivals of music by Berlioz, Ligeti, Schönberg, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky and Magnus Lindberg. His own orchestral works include Foreign Bodies, Insomnia, Wing on Wing, and Helix.

Photos of Frank Gehry by Melissa Majchrzak, Barbara Isenberg by Patricia Williams, Esa-Pekka Salonen by Nicho S?dling, and Alex Ross by David Michalek

Winning Without War
A new American president, political change in Israel, and turmoil in the Middle East.

Is there a political solution to Israel-Palestine, Iran, Iraq?

Are we in the midst of a "Cosmic War"?

If politics have failed, what is the alternative?

Two creative minds, writer and scholar of religions Reza Aslan and filmmaker Ari Folman, come together to explore this morass.

Reza Aslan's new book, How To Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, explodes the cosmic legacy of the Bush years that pitted Christianity against Islam and good against evil and he argues for a dramatic re-orientation in how we think about the ongoing struggle with Islamic extremism. Ari Folman brings his own unique experience in writing and directing his recent Academy Award nominated film, Waltz with Bashir, to demonstrate the remarkable power and authority that art, and especially movies, can have in changing the political conversation.

Reza Aslan and Ari Folman will discuss political and religious wars through the lens of the arts and media taking us beyond the tired realities and offer a way forward.

This event is co-presented by the Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel.

About Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and Senior Fellow at the Orfalae Center for Global and International Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara. He is a frequent commentator on CNN, CBS, and NPR, as well as cofounder and creative director of BoomGen Studios, a hub for creative content from and about the Middle East. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. His first book, No god but God, has been translated into thirteen languages. His articles and interviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Sojourners, Sun Magazine, the Guardian, and many other papers around the world. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles.

About Ari Folman

Ari Folman is a writer, director, and producer. His animated feature film, Waltz with Bashir, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foregin film in 2009. Based on a true story, the film is a quest into the director's memory for the missing pieces from the days of the Lebanon War in the mid 80s. Ari Folman and David Polonsky are the authors of the graphic novel, Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story. Folman has written for several successful Israeli TV series, including the award-winning In Therapy (Be Tipul), which was the basis for the HBO series In Treatment. His other films include Saint Clara, based on a novel by Czech author Pavel Kohout; Made in Israel; and Comfortably Numb.He lives in Israel.

Fiction in the Age of Inequality

Now that markets have proven a flawed index of our economic well being, our cultural life needs to look beyond the pat certainties of laissez faire ideology. Among the ills afflicting the American novel at the height of boom culture, Walter Benn Michaels argues, was a curatorial obsession with past oppressions from slavery to the Holocaust to memoir-style accounts of family abuse. Writers should now be asking less about what it meant to oppose the Holocaust, he contends, and more about what it means to support free trade.

David Simon, creator of The Wire, and Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon, join Michaels and novelist-critic Dale Peck to discuss the social vision of contemporary storytelling.

About Walter Benn Michaels
 

Walter Benn Michaels' most recent books are The Shape of the Signifier and The Trouble with Diversity. Recent articles include "Toutes les in galit's n'offensent pas le candidat Barack Obama" in Le Monde diplomatique and "The Death of a Beautiful Woman" in Interval(le)s.

About Dale Peck

Dale Peck is the author of nine books, most recently, Body Surfing, a novel, and Sprout, which is also a novel, but for teenagers. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of the New School.

About David Simon

David Simon's narrative non-fiction works Homicide and The Corner became an NBC drama and a HBO miniseries respectively and subsequently the HBO drama, The Wire. Most recently, Simon was a writer and executive producer of HBO's miniseries Generation Kill. Simon also writes for The New Yorker, Esquire and The Washington Post.

About Susan Straight

Susan Straight is professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her fifth novel, Highwire Moon, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Gold Medal for Fiction from the San Francisco-based Commonwealth Club. Straight's other fiction includes The Gettin' Place and Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights.

An evening of gentlemen bearing questions and channeling the great books that will answer them! Also, elder aerialist sages, minstrels, and the Dance of the Seven Veils! Tristan Tzara and Charlie Chaplin will be in the audience!

Andrei Codrescu's new book, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, will be Codrescu's chief oracle in this orgy of bibliomania. Codrescu was introduced to Mark Twain by Nikola Tesla in the novel Messia@.

Is old age a form of Dada expression? At what point does "eccentric" turn into "Dadaist?" Recounting examples of odd behavior from Henry Alford's new book, How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth), characters like Eugene Loh, a retired aerospace engineer who uses an emptied Frosted Flakes box as his briefcase, they will talk about how old age can be a wonderful time to become Dada. Paul Holdengräber will make a cameo appearance as Mark Twain.

Projected REAL TIME conversation drawing by Flash Rosenberg and "Unexceptional Tricks" by Max rada dada

About Henry Alford

Henry Alford is the author of How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth). He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times for more than a decade.

About Andrei Codrescu

Andrei Codrescu's new books are The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess and Jealous Witness: New Poems. He is the author of forty books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and the founder of Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Life & Letters. He received a Peabody award for the PBS version of his film Road Scholar. He has been a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered since 1983.

About Mark Twain

By the end of his life in 1910, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) published more than 30 books, hundreds of short stories and essays, and gave lecture tours around the world. Twain's new book is Who Is Mark Twain? by Mark Twain Himself, Never Before Published!

Artists:

About Flash Rosenberg

Flash Rosenberg is a freelance photographer and Artist-in-Residence for LIVE from the NYPL. She draws discussions in front of live audiences to create real time Conversation Portraits. These drawings are an amorphous portrait of what it feels like to translate complex ideas into simple lines. She squeezes 90-minute blabs into 5-to-8 minute animations, which may be seen on the LIVE website.

About Max rada dada

Max rada dada has performed in the 2005 New York Fringe Festival and has been touring the country ever since with his Sideshow of ?Unexceptional Tricks? performing at Intuit in Chicago, Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, Ohio University, and Houston's Art Car Parade among others. His performance at the Library is part of his "Veil of Happiness" Sideshow Detour 2009 in NYC.

Making Sense of Black Nationalism in the Obama Era

With an African-American president in the White House and the first black chairman voted to head the Republican National Committee has black nationalism become irrelevant? Novelist Victor LaValle explores the personal and political valences of the nationalist idea, and makes a case for embracing a more ecumenical view of black experience?including the freedom to move beyond traditional conceptions of blackness. Baz Dreisinger, author of Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture; Peniel E. Joseph, author of Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America; and Atlantic Monthly contributing editor Ta-Nehisi Coates respond.

About Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a contributing editor for The Atlantic. He lives in Harlem with his partner and his son.

About Baz Dreisinger

Baz Dreisinger is the author of Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture. She teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Together with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Peter Spirer, she produced and wrote the documentary Black & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop, which investigates the New York Police Department?s monitoring of the hip-hop industry.

About Peniel E. Joseph

Peniel E. Joseph is associate professor of Afro-American Studies and history at Brandeis University. He is author of Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. His book Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama will be published in 2010.

About Victor LaValle

Victor LaValle is the author of Slapboxing with Jesus and The Ecstatic. His novel, Big Machine, will be published in 2009.

In his book, Imaging India, Indian entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani traces the central ideas that shaped the country's past and present and asks the key question of the future of India and its role as a global citizen and emerging economic giant: How will India as a global power avoid the mistakes of earlier development models? Its future rests on more than simply economic growth; it also depends on reform and innovation in all sectors of public life.

Author and New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman says, Seattle has Bill. Bangalore has Nandan. . . . What makes Nilekani unique? For me it comes down to one phrase: great explainer. . . . It was his insight that the global playing field was being "leveled" by technology that inspired me to write the book The World Is Flat.?

About Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman, author and journalist, is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. His Foreign Affairs column appears every Wednesday and Sunday in The New York Times. Friedman is the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, The World Is Flat, and most recently, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How it Can Renew America. Friedman was named one of America's Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report.

About Nandan Nilekani

Nandan Nilekani is the Co-Chairman of Infosys Technologies Limited. He is the recipient of several awards, including the prestigious Joseph Schumpeter prize for innovative services in economy, economic sciences and politics. Nilekani was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2006 and was named Forbes Businessman of the Year  for Asia in 2007. Nilekani received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India.

Colleagues, friends, and family of John Updike, who died January 27, will gather to pay tribute to a titan of American literature.

David Remnick, Sonny Mehta, Charles McGrath, Judith Jones, Roger Angell, Lorrie Moore, Adam Gopnik, Deborah Garrison, Ann Goldstein, ZZ Packer, and David Updike will honor John Updike's life with remembrances and readings from his work.

Updike, the author of more than sixty books?including twenty-two novels, fifteen short-story collections, seven collections of poetry, and five children?s books?was the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards. He is probably best remembered for his quartet of novels featuring Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the first of which, Rabbit, Run, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1960, and the last, Rabbit at Rest, published in 1990.

In his half century writing for The New Yorker, he contributed fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism to the magazine; more than seventy of his book reviews and essays are collected in ?Due Considerations.? Before he died, Updike delivered the manuscripts for three new books, all of which will be published before the end of this year.

This event is co-presented by Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker

About Roger Angell

Roger Angell has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1944 and is now a senior editor and staff writer at the magazine. His writing has appeared in many anthologies and has been collected in nine books, most recently Let Me Finish, a collection of his memoir writing.

About Deborah Garrison

Deborah Garrison is the author of The Second Child -- Poems and A Working Girl Can't Win. She worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker for fifteen years and is the poetry editor of Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon Books.

About Ann Goldstein

Ann Goldstein joined The New Yorker in 1974 and is the head of the copy department. She worked with John Updike on his critical pieces for more than twenty years.

About Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of Paris to the Moon, The King in the Window, Through the Children?s Gate: A Home in New York, and, most recently, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life.

About Judith Jones

Judith Jones is Senior Editor and Vice President at Alfred A. Knopf. She is the author of The Tenth Muse.

About Sonny Mehta

Sonny Mehta is Chairman and Editor in Chief of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which includes Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon, Schocken, Everyman?s Library, Doubleday, Nan A. Talese, Vintage, Anchor, and Vintage Espa?ol; all are imprints of Random House, Inc.

About Charles McGrath

Charles McGrath is the former editor of the New York Times Book Review and a former editor at The New Yorker and contributes frequently to the New York Times Magazine, Golf Digest, and other publications.

About Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is the author of the short story collections, Self Help, Like Life, and Birds of America. Her novels are Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Her work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, among others.

About ZZ Packer

ZZ Packer is the author of the short story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, whose title story appeared in The New Yorker's 2000 Summer Fiction Issue. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2000 and 25 and Under: Fiction.

About David Remnick

David Remnick was named editor of The New Yorker in 1998. He is the author of Lenin's Tomb, Resurrection, The Devil Problem (and Other True Stories), King of the World, and, most recently, Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker. He has edited five anthologies of New Yorker pieces.

About David Updike

David Updike is a teacher of English at Roxbury Community College, in Boston. He has written several books, and a collection of short stories, Old Girlfriends, will be published in Summer 2009. He lives with his wife, Wambui, and son, Wesley, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews is Father Patrick Desbois story of his heroic mission to investigate the murder of Ukrainian Jews by Nazis during World War II. His team visited the sites of these murders, and interviewed surviving witnesses, many of whom were recruited by the Germans to assist in the executions.

Father Desbois, secretary to the French Conference of Bishops for relations with Judaism and advisor to the Vatican on the Jewish Religion, will discuss with Paul LeClerc, President of The New York Public Library, the stories he has uncovered about the first mass killings of the Holocaust that most people know nothing about.

About Father Patrick Desbois

Father Patrick Desbois is secretary to the French Conference of Bishops for relations with Judaism, advisor to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lyon, and advisor to the Vatican on the Jewish religion. Grandson of a deportee to the Rawa Ruska camp, he has set out to investigate the mass murder of Eastern European Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War. He is the winner of the B'nai B'rith International Award for Outstanding Contribution to Relations with the Jewish People. He is author of the new book The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. He lives in Paris, France.

About Paul LeClerc

Paul LeClerc is the President and Chief Executive Officer of The New York Public Library, which consists of 91 libraries that serve a more varied set of constituencies and has the broadest mission of any library in the nation. He is the author or co-editor of five scholarly volumes on writers of the French Enlightenment and his contributions to French culture earned him the Order of the Academic Palms (Officier) in 1989 and the French Legion of Honor (Chevalier) in 1996. Dr. LeClerc is currently a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, Union College, and The National Book Foundation.

What is the future for art and ideas in an age when practically anything can be copied, pasted, downloaded, sampled, and re-imagined?

LIVE from the NYPL and WIRED Magazine kick off the Spring 2009 season with a spirited discussion of the emerging remix culture. Our guides through this new world?who will take us from Jefferson's Bible to André the Giant to Wikipedia?will be Lawrence Lessig, author of Remix, founder of Creative Commons, and one of the leading legal scholars on intellectual property issues in the Internet age; acclaimed street artist Shepard Fairey, whose iconic Obama "HOPE" poster was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery; and cultural historian Steven Johnson, whose new book, The Invention of Air, argues that remix culture has deep roots in the Enlightenment and among the American founding fathers.

Virtuoso pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim in his new book, Music Quickens Time, draws on his profound engagement with music to argue its urgent value and importance in our everyday lives. While we may sometimes think of personal, social, and political issues as existing independently of each other, Barenboim shows with bravura and passion how music teaches us that this is impossible.

Drawing on his own involvement with Palestine in a conversation with Paul Holdengräber, Barenboim will examine the transformative power of music in the world, from his own performances of Wagner in Israel, his friendship with Edward Said, to the creation of the internationally acclaimed West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which continues to bring together young musicians from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia, and Israel to make music. Barenboim describes first-hand how music offers us a way to explore differences and at times resolve some of the most seemingly intractable issues of our times.

About Daniel Barenboim

Daniel Barenboim is one of the most prominent musicians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as both pianist and conductor. After 15 years conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, he is now principal guest conductor of the La Scala opera house in Milan, Italy. He has received numerous Grammy awards, and is the author of A Life in Music, and, co-authored with Edward Said, Parallels and Paradoxes. He was a UN Ambassador for Peace and has received many awards including the Goethe Medal, the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal, the Praemium Imperiale, and the Wolf Prize in Arts.

Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture

What does it mean when we speak in different ways to different people? Is it a sign of duplicity or the mark of a complex sensibility? Zadie Smith takes a look at register and tone, from the academy to the streets, through black and white, with examples (Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Humbert Humbert, Obama).

About Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith was born in North London in 1975. Her first novel, White Teeth, won the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Smith's other works include The Autograph Man and On Beauty. She has also written a non-fiction book about writing entitled Fail Better.

About The Robert B. Silvers Lecture

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky in recognition of the work of Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, of which he was a founder in 1963. The series features contemporary people whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silver?s interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

Modern day Israel and the Jewish community are strongly influenced by the memory and horrors of Hitler and the Holocaust. In his book, The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, Avraham Burg argues that the Jewish nation has been traumatized and has lost the ability to trust itself, its neighbors, or the world around it. He seeks to show that this is one of the causes for the growing nationalism and violence that are plaguing Israeli society and reverberating through Jewish communities worldwide. Burg uses his own family history to inform his views on what the Jewish people need to do to move on and eventually live in peace with their Arab neighbors and feel comfortable in world at large.

The distinguished historian Omer Bartov, author of Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, will be in conversation with Avraham Burg to address some of these claims:

• The Holocaust is Over is very critical of Zionism as it was implemented in Israel and Jewish nationalism more generally. Is Burg in general an opponent of nationalism, or does he simply think that it negates the historical role he envisions for Jews?
• Burg is critical of the nationalist myths upon which Zionism was founded; at the same time he professes a strong commitment to Jewish history going back to Biblical times. How does Burg square the circle of basing his anti-Zionist stance -- whereby he opposes fascist-like mythologies of blood and soil -- on a belief in Jewish destiny, fate, and universal mission. Does Burg consider himself a patriot?
• Burg seems to imply that Israel?or the Jews?should fulfill the role of being a beacon to the nations. Does this mean he sees Israel not as a normal state and the Jews not as a normal nation, but as a chosen people?
• Burg argues that Israel should stop speaking about the Holocaust as a political tool and drop the rhetoric of "never again." What role does he attribute to the rhetoric of "never again" vis-a-vis the numerous genocides that have occurred since 1945 and are still going on today, and does he think that Jews and Israelis have a special duty to fight against such mass murders?
• Burg implies (like Tony Judt) that while Israel was created with the intention of removing the main cause for antisemitism it has now become the main reason for it. What to his mind would effectively remove the causes of antisemitism?   

About Omer Bartov

Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy in Berlin, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. He is the author of Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, The "Jew" in Cinema, and Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine. He is currently writing a history of the town of Buczacz in Eastern Galicia.

About Avrum Burg

Avrum Burg is the author of The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from its Ashes, which Tony Judt has called "An important book by a very courageous man." A former Speaker of the Knesset in Israel, he has been active in politics as a leader in the Labor Party and the One Israel party. His article in The Guardian entitled "The End of Zionism" was widely read and debated. He lives with his wife in Nataf, a small village outside Jerusalem.

Rust Hills, the celebrated and storied fiction editor of Esquire, in that magazine's last golden era as a publisher of great literary fiction, died in August 2008, at the age of 83.

Rust Hills edited, befriended and brought to American readers a generation's worth of first-rate literary talent. Among the writers Rust Hills edited and encouraged were James Salter, Jim Harrison, Richard Ford, Bruce Jay Friedman, Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane, Jayne Anne Phillips, Francisco Goldman, Robert Stone, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff.

From the 1950's well into the 1990's, Rust Hills' name, his wide literary appreciation, his?at times courtly, remarkably convivial, and decidedly mid-century public self?was not only a significant presence behind American's understanding of what extraordinary fiction looked like; but he was, as well, a generous, loyal, fastidious (and occasionally infuriating) blue-pencil editor, who month-upon-month inspired young story-writers and novelists in the direction of their very best work.

Rust Hills was perhaps one of the last of a great breed of New York fiction editors who once enriched our reading and cultural life.

Join Will Blythe, Byron Dobell, Lee Eisenberg, Richard Ford, Beverly Lowry, Terry McDonell, and James Salter, as they pay tribute to Rust Hills.

About Will Blythe

Will Blythe is the author of To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever, and a former colleague of Rust Hills at Esquire.

About Byron Dobell

Byron Dobell was the managing editor of Esquire in the Sixties when Rust Hills was its fiction editor. He was also editorial director of New York magazine, managing editor of Life, and editor of American Heritage. He is now a portraitist.

About Lee Eisenberg

Lee Eisenberg is a former editor-in-chief of Esquire. His most recent book, The Number, a New York Times bestseller, was published in 2006.

About Richard Ford

Richard Ford is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Independence Day and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction.

About Beverly Lowry

Beverly Lowry is the author of six novels and three nonfiction works, including Crossed Over. She teaches at George Mason University, and credits Rust Hills with her start in publishing.

About Terry McDonell

Terry McDonell worked with Rust Hills at Esquire, where he was editor in chief from 1990 to 1993. He is now Time Inc. Group Editor, overseeing Sports Illustrated and a number of other magazines and websites; and serves as president of the board of the Paris Review.

About James Salter

James Salter is a novelist (A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years) and short story writer (Dusk, Last Night) many of whose stories were published in Esquire when Rust Hills was literary editor. He won the PEN/Faulkner in 1989.

"...Memory gets smoothed down with time, everything flattened by the iron of acceptance and rejection."

"The recounting of life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence."

----Carol Shields

The Stone Diaries

The Stone Diaries is Carol Shields' most celebrated work and is the poignant story of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a woman who struggles to understand the contradictions that make up her life. This fictional biography spans over a century and begins with Daisy entering the world as her mother takes her last breath. As narrator, Daisy shows us a bird's eye view of her journey from her motherless childhood through a maze of self development and yearning for identity, two marriages, children, an unexpected career as columnist, later decline into illness and finally old age as Daisy sustains her last years in infirmity.

The richness of Daisy?s vividly described internal life transforms this seemingly ordinary tale. Carol Shields displays her compassion, insight and honest humor through a subtle, but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional existence. No life, however seemingly small, is without significance.

About Carol Shields

Carol Shields (1935-2003) was an American-born Canadian and the author of numerous novels and short story collections. The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1995, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Canada?s Governor General?s Award. Her other novels and short story collections include The Republic of Love, Happenstance, Swann, The Orange Fish, Various Miracles, The Box Garden, and Small Ceremonies. She is the recipient of a Canada Council Major Award, two National Magazine Awards, The Orange Prize for Fiction (1997, 2003), and the 1993 Booker Prize. Carol Shields died in 2003 from breast cancer.

About Sara Botsford

Sara Botsford is a Canadian actress. She is probably best known for her role of Ann Hildebrand in the television series E.N.G.. In 2002 Sara portrayed Kathleen Sinclair in the TV movie Trudeau about the life of the late Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

About Anne Giardini

Anne Giardini has written and published essays, stories, and articles on many topics and was a columnist for the National Post, one of Canada's national newspapers. Her first novel was The Sad Truth About Happiness. Advice for Italian Boys is scheduled for publication in early 2009. Anne Giardini is the daughter of Carol Shields and lives in Vancouver with her husband and three children.

About Martin Levin

Martin Levin is the books editor of The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Canada's largest weekly books section. He is also a contributor to a number of anthologies, most recently Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories about Childbirth.

About Sarah McNally

Sarah McNally owns and operates McNally Jackson Books in downtown Manhattan, the largest general independent in New York City. She worked as an editor before opening her store in 2004. McNally is a native of Winnipeg, Canada, Carol Shields' home town, where her parents and sister are booksellers. She now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

About Shelagh Rogers

Shelagh Rogers is a Canadian radio host for The Next Chapter on CBC Radio One, a weekly tour into the world of Canadian literature. Rogers is an advocate for mental health and received a Transforming Lives Award in May 2008. For over twenty two years, she has volunteered for Frontier College, Canada's largest literacy network and she hosts an annual Bonspiel for Literacy. Shelagh Rogers lives in Vancouver.

About Donald Shields

Don Shields has a Ph.D. in civil engineering and served as Dean of Engineering at The University of Manitoba. In 1957 he married Carol Warner and they had five children; John, Anne, Catherine, Meg and Sara. The couple was married for 46 years and lived in Canada until Carol Shields' death in 2003. Don Shields now lives in New York, Victoria, and France with Arlette Baker.

About David Staines

David Staines is an authority on medieval literature and culture and studies and writes about Canadian literature and culture. He is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and is currently Interim Director of the Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa. Staines wrote the introduction to Carol Shields? holdings at the National Library of Canada.

About Jane Urquhart

Jane Urquhart has published poetry, I'm Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan; novels, The Whirlpool, Changing Heaven, Away, and The Underpainter; and a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass. Her fifth novel, The Stonecarvers was shortlisted for the Giller prize. The author lives in a Southwestern Ontario village with her husband.

About Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer is the author of eight novels, including The Ten-Year Nap, The Wife, and The Position. Wolitzer?s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, and she has taught writing at The University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and Columbia University. She lives in New York with her husband and sons.

Nobel Prize recipient Toni Morrison uses fantasy, a sinuous poetic style, and a rich interweaving of the mythic in her writing to reveal the black American experience. She tells the stories of her characters and their struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity in an unjust society.

A Mercy, Morrison?s ninth novel, uncovers what lies beneath the surface of slavery in an ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother abandoning her daughter in order to save her. Like her novel Beloved, the story takes place in the American past. Set in the 17th century northeast when the slave trade was in its infancy, her characters provide a detailed look at the social environment of religious persecution and racial hatred, and the class distinction that allowed the institution of slavery to take root in the US.

Toni Morrison and Fran Lebowitz explore together how the broad strokes of history impact the personal choices of the individuals caught in history?s reach.

About Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison has been the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novels include Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and Love. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Princeton University. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.

About Fran Lebowitz

Fran Lebowitz is the author of the two critically acclaimed New York Times best-sellers Metropolitan Life and Social Studies and the children?s book Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas. She is also the author of the half-finished cult novel Exterior Signs of Wealth and the absolutely almost completed book-length essay Progress.

As The New York Review of Books turns 45, the evening will feature some of the publication's most illustrious contributors including former Cullman Center Fellow and Melville scholar Andrew Delbanco; journalist, essayist, and novelist Joan Didion; author and economistJeff Madrick; writer Darryl Pinckney; journalist Michael Tomasky; historian Garry Wills; and others. Moderated by The New York Review of Books editor Robert B. Silvers.

This event is co-presented with

About Andrew Delbanco

 Andrew Delbanco is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor Chair in the Humanities and Director of the American Studies program at Columbia University. His most recent book is Melville: His World and Work. Hailed as ?America?s Best Social Critic? by Time Magazine, Delbanco, writes regularly for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and other journals. He was a member of the inaugural class of fellows at the Library?s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Delbanco?s new book, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be, will be published in 2010.

About Joan Didion

Joan Didion is a journalist, essayist, and novelist. She has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1973 and is the author of, most recently, The Year of Magical Thinking, winner of the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction, and We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction.

About Jeff Madrick

Jeff Madrick is a former economics columnist for The New York Times and editor of Challenge Magazine. He has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books for more than a dozen years, is visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union and senior fellow of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School. His latest book is The Case for Big Government.

About Darryl Pinckney

Darryl Pinckney is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and is the author of the novel, High Cotton, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction; Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature; and Sold and Gone: African American Literature and U.S. Society. He received the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994.

About Robert B. Silvers

Robert B. Silvers is the editor of The New York Review of Books. He was a founding co-editor with Barbara Epstein with whom he worked for over forty years, beginning in 1963, until her death in 2006. He has edited several essay anthologies featuring New York Review contributors, including The Consequences to Come: American Power After Bush in 2008.

About Michael Tomasky

Michael Tomasky is Editor of Guardian America, The Guardian's American Website. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Tomasky is the author of Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America, a study of the intellectual collapse of the American left, and of Hillary's Turn: Inside Her Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign, a chronicle of Clinton's successful 2000 election to the Senate.

About Garry Wills

Garry Wills is the author of What Jesus Meant, What Paul Meant, Papal Sin, and Why I am a Catholic. He is the translator of Saint Augustine?s Confessions and author of The Rosary. His works on American history have received many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Lincoln at Gettysburg. He writes for The New York Review of Books and is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University. His new book is What The Gospels Meant.

"The Sound of Literature": Creative vistas on the remarkable intersection of words and music.

Co-presented with New York City Opera's Opera Matters! series.

Beware of The New Annotated Dracula! After his New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie Klinger returns with a daring conceit: the Dracula tale is based on historical fact. Klinger?s research took him to the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia, where Stoker?s notes are housed, and to Seattle to spend two days with the guarded manuscript (Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen is the owner). He points out errors and inconsistencies in the narrative that reveal the truth: that Stoker covered up the real story of the Harkers? travels and the real location of Castle Dracula and invented Dracula?s supposed death.

Be prepared on the eve of Halloween to travel through two hundred years of popular culture and myth as well as the graveyards and the wilds of Transylvania as Klinger, the superb literary detective, investigates the multifarious subtexts of the original narrative?from the masochistic to the necrophilic. Die-hard Dracula fans will not be disappointed by the vampire-prince. The actress Zoe Caldwell will do a reading.

About Leslie Klinger

Leslie Klinger is considered to be one of the world?s foremost authorities on twin icons of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. He is the editor of the three-volume collection of the short stories and novels, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work and nominated for every other major award in the mystery genre. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

About Zoe Caldwell

Zoe Caldwell has performed in major theaters around the world, working with many of the greatest actors, writers and directors of the 20th Century, including Charles Laughton, Albert Finney, Edith Evans, Paul Robeson and Laurence Olivier. She has won four Tony Awads for Slapstick Tragedy, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Medea and Master Class. She is author of I Will Be Cleopatra, a memoir.

James Beard-award winning chef Grant Achatz and sous vide guru Nathan Myhrvold will explore the ways that science and technology are transforming our notions of food. Using new tools and techniques, top chefs are creating dishes that range from the simply delicious to the otherworldly, challenging both the mind and palate. Kitchens, once the home of stoves, food processors and not much else, are becoming more like laboratories, stocked with centrifuges and canisters of liquid nitrogen.

Grant Achatz is the chef and owner of Alinea restaurant in Chicago. Nathan Myhrvold is the CEO of Intellectual Ventures and former CTO of Microsoft. Wired senior editor Mark McClusky will moderate the discussion.

This event is co-presented with 

About Grant Achatz

Grant Achatz is the chef and owner of Alinea. Food & Wine named him one of the Best New Chefs in 2002. He received the James Beard Rising Star Chef award in 2003; the Best Chef/Great Lakes award in 2007; and the top James Beard honor, Outstanding Chef in the United States, in 2008. Before opening Alinea in 2005, Achatz was sous chef at the French Laundry in Yountville, CA, and the executive chef of Trio in Chicago. His new book is Alinea

About Mark McClusky

Mark McClusky is a Wired senior editor. He has written extensively about food and technology, including a feature profile of Achatz, and a look at Myhrvold's sous vide research. He is one of the authors of Alinea, the first cookbook from Achatz's restaurant. McClusky directs gear and gadget coverage at Wired.

About Nathan Myhrvold

Nathan Myhrvold is chief executive officer and a founder of Intellectual Ventures, a firm dedicated to creating and investing in invention. When he's not encouraging innovation in others, Myhrvold is an active inventor with nearly 300 patents issued or pending, including several related to food technology. Before founding Intellectual Ventures, Myhrvold was the first chief technology officer at Microsoft, where he helped develop Microsoft Windows and Office and founded Microsoft Research.

A LIVE from the NYPL forum on the global economic crisis with three leading authorities:

Nouriel Roubini (NYU) was one of the earliest and most persistent economists warning us of the housing bubble leading to our present financial calamities. Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia) has dealt with financial crisis over a quarter century in all parts of the world. Felix Rohatyn is famed as the man who saved NYC from its financial crisis of the 1970s as well as a leading financier, diplomat, and voice for public responsibility. This conversation, moderated by Charlie Rose, among these three experts will enable the public to join in a unique reasoned and detailed discussion of the origins and perhaps solutions to the current upheaval.

This event is sponsored by

About Felix Rohatyn

Felix Rohatyn served as United States Ambassador to France from 1997 to 2000 and is a Commander in the French Legion of Honor. Prior to his appointment as Ambassador in Paris, Rohatyn was a managing director of the investment-banking firm Lazard Fr?res & Co. LLC in New York. From 1975 to 1993, he was chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) of the State of New York, where he managed the negotiations that enabled New York City to resolve its financial crisis in the late seventies. He served as a member of the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange from 1968 to 1972. Felix Rohatyn is currently the President of FGR Associates LLC, a firm that provides financial advice to corporations.

About Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini is Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University and Chairman of RGE Monitor, an economic and geo-strategic information service named one of the best economics websites by Business Week, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. Roubini is an internationally known expert in the field of international macroeconomics and has served as a senior adviser to the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the U.S. Treasury Department. Roubini has published numerous policy papers and books on key international macroeconomic issues; and is regularly cited as an authority in the media.

About Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs is Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Sachs is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years he has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. In 2005, Sachs was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, and the World Affairs Council of America identified him as one of the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy. His books include Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet and The End of Poverty.

About Charlie Rose

Emmy award-winning journalist Charlie Rose is executive editor and anchor of Charlie Rose, the nightly one-hour interview program that engages in one-on-one in-depth conversation and round table discussions about important issues and ideas of our time. Since 1991, Charlie Rose has become a unique venue for individuals in politics, performing arts, literature, film, science, medicine, and business. Rose has received numerous journalistic awards and honorary degrees. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has also agreed to be a contributor to CBS News 60 Minutes.

While a chill has crept into the evening air, and Halloween and the Days of the Dead are upon us, Ann Wroe, co-author of The Economist Book of Obituaries and its current editor of some of the best obituaries in the world, discusses the making of obituaries, their thrills and pitfalls, their rewards, and their insidious influence with Marilyn Johnson, who has studied the art and peculiar habits of obituary writers around the world and is author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. Daniel Okrent, who was the first Public Editor for the New York Times and the creator of Rotisserie League Baseball begins every day (for the past 40 years) turning to the New York Times obit page to see who has died and how they have lived. In recent years, he pays ever more attention to how old they were. It is impossible, Wroe says, to write obituaries for a living and not be drawn into musings on life and death. For her, each obituary is in fact "a progress report on a life that continues, somehow, elsewhere".

For the first 150 years of its life, The Economist magazine did not bother to record the lives of the dead. Since 1995 it has relented, and the Obituary page?odd, quirky, poetic, sometimes shocking, in the best British tradition of the craft?has become a favourite with readers. Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II, Hunter S. Thompson, Charlton Heston and?in a famous double-header?Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley, have all been commemorated or eviscerated there. Rather than somber records of death, Economist obituaries are celebrations of all that is weird or wonderful, repulsive or inspiring, in human life.

Nothing is better for the soul than a good, bracing look at eternity. And here to peek into the abyss?with brisk advice for those who hope to leave in their wake a three column obituary, instead of a mere two?are the writers, Ann Wroe and Marilyn Johnson, whose business is to usher out the dead. Do we want the pretty stories in our obituaries, or the dirt? Daniel Okrent will weigh in on this discussion and ask: What?s wrong with reading obits as entertainment? And is it better to run a youthful photo or a wrinkled one?

This event is co-sponsored by

About Ann Wroe

Ann Wroe is the Obituaries and Briefing Editor of The Economist.

She Joined The Economist in 1976 to cover American Politics, and has held the posts of Books and Arts editor (1988-1992) and American editor (1992-2000). She is the author of five books, among them Pontius Pilate : The Biography of an Invented Man and Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself. She is married with three sons and lives in London.

About Marilyn Johnson

Marilyn Johnson is the author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiff, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, in which she turned a fascinated eye on journalists whose job description it is to bring the dead back (briefly) to life.

Other than outrageous oddities, like the man who drove hundreds of nails into his skull, or the transsexual whistler, the most compelling subjects in the thousands of obituaries she read were librarians. The subject of her next book are those curious, intelligent, mysterious people, whose job it is to save us from being buried alive by the information age, Librarians. Marilyn Johnson has been credited with making the creepy profession of obituary writing cool.

About Daniel Okrent

Daniel Okrent concluded his term as the first Public Editor of the New York Times in 2005. He has published four books--most recently Public Editor Number One. Okrent worked as the co-creative director of Our Times, an Illustrated encyclopedia of the twentieth century; he is the inventor and founder of Rotisserie LeagueBaseball; he was a featured commentator on Ken Burns's PBS series Baseball, and has appeared in Woody Allen's, Sweet and Lowdown.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs?known as "LIVE from the NYPL"?for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

No one can get into elBulli, Ferran Adrià's restaurant on the northeast coast of Spain. But plenty of people certainly try: every year, the restaurant receives over two million requests for only 8,000 seats during the six months it is open. For the other six months, Adrià, who is proud to be called the Salvador Dali of the Kitchen," travels, dreams, and creates at his "food laboratory" in Barcelona, called elBulli Taller, where his team includes a chemist and an industrial designer who also design plates and serving utensils to go with the food. No wonder, as Corby Kummer wrote in The Atlantic, making the twisty two-hour drive from Barcelona for a dinner that ends well into the wee hours has become a notch on every foodie's belt perhaps the notch, given the international derby to get reservations.

Spike Lee's new film, Miracle at St. Anna, chronicles the story of four black American soldiers who are members of the US Army as part of the all African-American 92nd "Buffalo Soldier" Division stationed in Tuscany, Italy during World War II. Based on the novel and with screenplay by James McBride, it is a story about redemption and triumph over the bleakest of experiences.

The book, Miracle at St. Anna, The Motion Picture, is not only a visual tribute to this epic, but also to the countless African American soldiers who risked their lives for a country in which they were treated with less respect than the enemy they were fighting. The book includes costume designs, storyboard sketches, personal text by Spike Lee, a full script book, and archival material from the Second World War.

Spike Lee and James McBride will be in conversation with Paul Holdengräber to discuss this historical American story that exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge, and forgiveness.

About Spike Lee

Spike Lee is an Emmy Award winning, and Academy Award-nominated American film director, producer, writer, and actor noted for his films dealing with controversial social and political issues. He also teaches film at Columbia University. His production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, has produced over thirty-five films since 1983, including Do the Right Thing, She's Gotta Have it, Malcolm X, and 25th Hour.

About James McBride

James McBride is an accomplished musician. He is the author of two novels: Miracle at St. Anna, now a major motion picture by director Spike Lee, and Song Yet Sung. McBride has written for The Washington Post, People, The Boston Globe, Essence, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. McBride is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

In Céline Curiol's Voice Over, a lonely young woman works as an announcer in Paris's Gare du Nord, surrounded by people yet separate from them. Alone she waits for a man who loves another. In her solitude, she wanders the streets of the modern city, playing on the edge of danger, seeking connection.

"I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American Wilderness." So begins Paul Auster's Man in the Dark. The man thinking these thoughts is a retired book critic who imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America, the twin towers did not fall, and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union, and a bloody civil war ensued.

Two novelists come together to talk about living and writing in a world of ordinary joys, contradictions, and impulses while always being capable of the most grotesque violence.

About Paul Auster

Paul Auster is the author of numerous novels including The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, and City of Glass. His nonfiction works include The Invention of Solitude and The Art of Hunger. He edited I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project Anthology. Auster has also written screenplays including Smoke and Lulu on the Bridge. He recently wrote and directed The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which premiered at New York's New Directors/New Films Festival in 2007. He lives in Brooklyn.

About Céline Curiol

Céline Curiol is a journalist who has worked for various French media, including Libération, Radio France, and BBC Afrique. Her first novel Voix sans issue has been translated into fourteen languages, and will be released September 2008 in English in the US under the title Voice Over. Her second novel Permission and her travel book on Sierra Leone have recently been published in France. Originally from Lyon, Curiol lives in New York City, where she is at work on her third novel.

In What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?, the preeminent Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes, who trained as a psychiatrist and spent four year in the Portuguese army during the Angolan War, tells a story of sanity lost, of madness and consumption. This is a saga of growing old, of loving no matter what, and finally of a young man ineluctably coming to terms with the sins of his father and the life he has inherited now.

Based on a real life story and set in the steamy world of Lisbon's nightclub milieu of the 1990s "a baleful planet populated by drag queens, clowns, and drug addicts" the son of a legendary transvestite searches for his identity as he recalls the harrowing death of his father. The razor-thin line between reality and madness is fully transgressed in Lobo Antunes's first novel to appear in English in five years.

About António Lobo Antunes

António Lobo Antunes is the author of 18 novels, including Act of the Damned and The Natural Order of Things. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Lobo Antunes? first novel was Memory of an Elephant. His more recent novels are The Inquisitors? Manual, about life during the Salazar dictatorship, and The Return of the Caravels, about the breakup of Portugal's colonial dominion in the 1970s. Lobo Antunes has received numerous literary awards, such as the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society and the Camões Prize, the most important literary prize for the Portuguese language. He lives in Lisbon.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs, known as "LIVE from the NYPL", for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

Robert Badinter, the French Minister of Justice between 1981 and 1986, led the battle to abolish the death penalty in France. He became a militant abolitionist after watching one of his clients unjustly guillotined in 1972. Over the next decade, he fought the death penalty in the courts and saved six men from the guillotine. After the election of François Mitterrand in 1981, Badinter was named Minister of Justice and pushed through the legislation that abolished the death penalty.

Badinter's book, Abolition: One Man's Battle Against the Death Penalty, serves as a guidebook on the various legal and political strategies that can be used in the quest for abolition. With U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Badinter recently co-authored a book on the role of judges.

In a discussion about the death penalty, Badinter will be joined by Neal Katyal who recently won Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in the United States Supreme Court and who in July of this year agreed to serve as lead counsel for the State of Louisiana in asking the United States Supreme Court to reconsider its June decision abolishing the use of the death penalty for child rapists. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, will introduce the evening. He has written the forward for Badinter's book, Abolition.

About Robert Badinter

Robert Badinter is the author of over a dozen books including work on Oscar Wilde and Condorcet. He also co-authored a recent book on the role of judges with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Badinter is married to the prominent feminist Elisabeth Badinter. Together, they form one of France?s most influential couples. He is currently a member of the French Senate and celebrated his 80th birthday in March 2008.

About Neal Katyal

Georgetown University Law Professor, Neal Katyal, named one of the leading "40 lawyers under 40" by the National Law Journal, recently won Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in the United States Supreme Court, a case that challenged the policy of military trials at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba. Katyal served as co-counsel for Vice President Al Gore in the U.S. Supreme Court election case Bush v. Palm Beach Canvassing Board, which challenged the Florida voting system. He has clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer as well as Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Katyal has appeared on every major American nightly news program including the Colbert Report.

"Does the common reader exist in our world of splitting screens" Where might we find beauty, seriousness or moral passion among our fraying books? And does it even make sense to put Flaubert, Homer, and Oliver Stone into the same sentence? Two of the defining public critics of our time James Wood, a passionate reader who creates cathedrals out of words, and Daniel Mendelsohn, a professional classicist bringing rigor to the popular arts investigate the space where reading ends and real criticism begins.

---Pico Iyer

 Pico Iyer will conduct a discussion with Daniel Mendelsohn and James Wood, both authors of new books of criticism. Mendelsohn's How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken is a collection of essays that comments on the vast landscape of contemporary American culture from Quentin Taratino?s film Kill Bill which he sees as representing a generation raised on television reruns and video replays to a theatrical face-off between the work of Stephen Sondheim ?but it's about something? and Mel Brooks ?a wholly safe evening.

In his book, How Fiction Works, Wood says that you have to "read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it" as he explores not just how fiction works but how a novelist's choices make us feel that a novel ultimately works or doesn't.

About Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer studied nothing but literature for eight years at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, and regularly writes literary essays for The New York Review of Books, Harper's, the T.L.S., The American Scholar among others. He is the author of two novels, Abandon and Cuba and the Night, as well as seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and, most recently, The Open Road, an account of 33 years of talks and travels with the XIVth Dalai Lama.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and many other publications. He is the author of The Lost, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award. The author?s other awards include an NBCC award for book reviewing and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. He teaches at Bard College. His new essay collection is How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken.

About James Wood

James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a visiting lecturer in English and American literature at Harvard University. He is the author of two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and a novel, The Book Against God. His new book is How Fiction Works.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, France's "rock-star philosopher," and Slavoj Žižek, the Slovanian "Elvis of cultural theory," will scrutinize the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those of the future, as they argue for a new political and moral vision for our times and investigate the limits of tolerance.

Does the advent of capitalism cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of the neighbor? asks Žižek in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.

Are human rights Western or Universal? How is it that progressives themselves-those who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascism-have now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes? asks Lévy in Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against New Barbarism.

About Bernard-Henri Lévy

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, journalist, activist, and filmmaker. He was hailed by Vanity Fair magazine as ?Superman and prophet: we have no equivalent in the United States.? Among his dozens of books are American Vertigo, Barbarism with a Human Face, and Who Killed Daniel Pearl? His writing has appeared in a wide range of publications throughout Europe and the United States. His films include the documentaries Bosna! and A Day in the Death of Sarajevo. Lévy is co-founder of the antiracist group SOS Racism and has served on diplomatic missions for the French government.

About Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek's work triggers continuous controversy; Welcome to the Desert of the Real, his analysis of 9/11, was attacked both as anti-Semitic in Israel and as Zionist in Egypt. He is the author of more than thirty books and is the subject of the documentary Žižek!. His own critically acclaimed documentary, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, was the subject of a film retrospective in 2007 at the Museum of Modern Art. Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and has been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Princeton, and The New School.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

Drawing on more than seven years of research, Salman Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is the story of a woman who attempts to command her own destiny in a man's world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role.

The story opens with a young European traveler who calls himself ‘Mogor dell’Amore,’ the Mughal of Love. He arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal Empire, with a tale that captivates the imperial capital, a story about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far off city of Florence.

With storytelling that mixes political intrigue and high drama, romance and magic, Jeffrey Eugenides and Salman Rushdie discuss the ways in which the novel is a reflection on war and politics, gender and society, fantasy and rumor, individuality and public life, and how the brutal past still influences our present world.

About Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Shalimar the Clown, Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and one collection of short stories, East, West. He has also published works of non-fiction including The Jaguar Smile and Imaginary Homelands.

About Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of the novels The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. His latest book, My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro, was published in January 2008. Jeffrey Eugenides is a Professor of Creative Writing at the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University.

Friends and fellow Irish writers of Nuala O’Faolain, who died in Dublin on May 9, will gather to pay tribute to one of Ireland?s best-loved writers.

Internationally known for her searing memoir, Are You Somebody?, as well as her acclaimed first novel, My Dream of You, O'Faolain was widely respected in Ireland as an award-winning television producer, journalist, and columnist for The Irish Times before her memoir caused a sensation on its publication in 1999. Her unblinking, unsentimental description of an impoverished Irish childhood that struck a chord with readers world-wide became a New York Times bestseller.

Frank McCourt, Paul Muldoon, Fintan O'Toole, Julie Grau, Sheridan Hay, John Low-Beer, and Deidre Brady will honor Nuala Nuala O'Faolaine's life with reminiscence, traditional music, and readings from her work.O'Faolain

Special live musical performance by Susan McKeown, vocals; Eamon O'Leary, guitar; Dana Lyn, fiddle; Cillian Vallely, uillean pipes, flutes; and Lindsey Horner, bass. During March 2005, McKeown appeared with O'Faolain at LIVE from the NYPL.

About Nuala O’Faolain

is the author of Are You Somebody?, My Dream of You, Almost There, and The Story of Chicago May. Her first memoir is often seen as a feminine, and feminist, counterpart to Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. 'A lot of us suffered in the Ireland of my day,' she later said. We came out of a culture where women were utterly powerless and children had no value. If you were hit at school you were hit at home for being hit at school. The only education a lot of us got was in neglect and being unloved.

And yet, O'Faolain's humanity softened her observations and her humor was irresistible. Despite being a well-known opinion columnist, a television and radio commentator, and bona fide celebrity, her work often chronicled her own sense of personal failure. She turned her vulnerability into a strength that enabled her to empathize with ordinary people?s fears and hopes. Her opinion column developed from a broadly feminist commentary to a narrative that spanned all aspects of the human condition. Her memoirs touched many readers, who responded by sending her hundreds of letters with their own tales of unhappiness and failed family life.

A resident of Brooklyn for much of the past seven years, O'Faolain ascribed her affinity for the City to her experience growing up one of nine children. ?When you live in the middle of mayhem for so long, you grow to need mayhem to construct peace within it.? As Maura Casey wrote in an Appreciation in the New York Times: 'Although her mortal life has ended, her words, her sympathy and insights, are here. Her writing helped her legions of readers believe in her and in the validity of their own experiences.'

About Deirdre Brady

Deirdre Brady is the next-youngest after Nuala of the nine O'Faolain children. She is the author of Thank You For the Days, a memoir that views the O'Faolain family from a very different perspective than her sister's. She left school when she was fifteen and at 20 years of age she married Eamon Brady, with whom she has seven children. She lives in Dublin.

About Julie Grau

Julie Grau is Senior Vice President and Publisher of Speigel & Grau, a division of Random House. Previously she was Vice President and Publisher of Riverhead Books, where she edited Nuala O'Faolain's novel, My Dream of You, her memoir, Almost There, and her work of biography, The Story of Chicago May.

About Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay is a novelist, editor, and teacher. She met Nuala O'Faolain in 1999 and remained a close friend until her death.

About John Low-Beer

John Low-Beer and Nuala O'Faolain met in 2002 and registered as domestic partners a year later. An attorney for the City of New York and a former professor of sociology, Low-Beer lives in Brooklyn with his daughter, Anna.

About Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for his memoir Angela's Ashes. He is also the author of 'Tis and Teacher Man, both international bestsellers. McCourt appeared with O'Faolain and others for "Silence, Exile and Cunning: What?s So Irish About That Anyway" on March 15, 2005, at LIVE from the NYPL.

About Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon teaches at Princeton University and is an Honorary Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. He held the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University five years and he is an Honorary Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford University. In 2003 he won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and in 2007, he became poetry editor of The New Yorker.

About Fintan O'Toole

Fintan O'Toole is a literary critic, historical writer, and political commentator. He is known for his commentary on a remarkably wide-ranging number of subjects cultural, historical, political, social and economic. O'Toole has written for the Irish Times since 1988 and was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001. He is the author of more than ten books.

"Few of us emerged from the twentieth century with a strong, sustaining neighborhood to call home. We are sprawled away from one another, or packed into poverty. These two ends must be brought closer toward a middle of vital, dense, playful neighborhoods that nourish our souls and our communities."

---Mindy Fullilove

What is the American Dream? Does it mean having a 'better life' by creating a home and a community, living together for generations, building and tending relationships to one another and to a place? Or do we create a "better life" by moving up, moving out, removing the old, replacing with the new

Between 1949 and 1973 urban renewal, a program of the U.S. government, bulldozed 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 American cities and dispossessed one million people. Roots got cut, neighbors and families became separated, languages and cultures were destroyed, and social bonds were broken.

The current exhibition at The New York Public Library, Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City through August 29, features the work of five contemporary New York?based photographers 'Thomas Holton, Bettina Johae, Reiner Leist, Zoe Leonard, and Ethan Levitas' whose works intersect and resonate with current concerns about the reorganization of urban space, and its public use, in New York City. Artist Glenn Ligon offers the literal narrative of his own housing in the city. In addition to proposed regulations that threaten First Amendment rights to photograph in public places thus becoming a form of privatization of public space, questions also arise with the current private/public arrangements that characterize much of modern urban development, particularly the legal power of eminent domain, or the taking of private property for public use.

Marshall Berman, Professor of Political Science, City College and the Graduate Center; Mindy Fullilove, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Public Health at Columbia University; Tom Angotti, Professor of Urban Affairs & Planning at Hunter College; and Brian Berger, photographer/blogger, will discuss the use of eminent domain and how urban renewal is changing the cityscape of New York City. Filmmaker Michael Galinsky will moderate.

The Atlantic Yards, a hotly contested developer driven project in Brooklyn, will serve as a focus through which the evening will begin. A short trailer from the film Battle of Brooklyn, directed by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley, will portray the arguments of some of the main players in this current eminent domain debate.

After a summary of how the use of eminent domain is shaping our City, an open discussion with the audience will address what all of this means for the future of NYC.

About Tom Angotti

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, CUNY, and Director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. He is the Land Use columnist for www.gothamgazette.com and edits Progressive Planning Magazine. He is the author of Metropolis 2000 and Housing in Italy and founding member of the Task Force on Community-Based Planning in New York City. His book, New York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, will be published in October 2008.

About Brian Berger

Historian, journalist and photographer Brian Berger is the co-editor of New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg. He writes about literature, film, and music for Stop Smiling magazine and also publishes the all-city blog, WhoWalkInBrooklyn.com. He divides his time between South Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach, Queens.

About Marshall Berman

Marshall Berman is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at City College of New York and CCNY Graduate Center, where he teaches political theory and urban studies. His books include On The Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square and All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. He is co-editor of New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg.

About Mindy Fullilove

Mindy Fullilove is a research psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute and a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University. She has studied the long-term consequences of urban renewal for African American people and co-founded NYC RECOVERS for the social and emotional recovery of NYC after 9/11. She is the author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It.

About Michael Galinsky

Michael Galinsky is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Currently he and his partners Suki Hawley and David Beilinson are working on several Brooklyn-based projects that track issues related to development. For four and a half years they have been following the saga of the Atlantic Yards development. Most recently they worked on a film about Arthur Wood's efforts to save his landmark artistic statement, The Broken Angel, from destruction. Previous films are Horn and Halos and Code 33.

All I did was what I was told to do. I didn't make the war. I can't end the war. I mean, photographs can't just make or change a war. It just doesn't make sense. I mean, how do people see me as the villain? The government is just putting the blame on me because they can?just like a decoy. I can't get mad. I mean, I'm over it. I'm fine. I mean, I'm not fine with it but whatever. ---Private First Class Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib, 2003.

From Standard Operating Procedure  

When the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib prison were first made public four years ago, they seemed to constitute an awesome expose of the profound corruption of America's response to September 11th. The sanction of torture, and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners in wartime, have become defining legacies of the current Administration?and have given us the defining images of America's changing standing in the eyes of the world. But it didn't take long for the soldiers who took and appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs to be singled out as depraved rogues, when in fact they were implementing America's de facto policy in Iraq. Just as criminality had become the norm, the expose now became the cover-up.

Now, two of our keenest moral and political observers, author Philip Gourevitch and filmmaker Errol Morris, have taken on the story of the soldiers who took and appeared in the photographs?and they have produced a war story that explores the horror at the core of the ongoing campaign to fight terror with terror. In their new book, Standard Operating Procedure, Gourevitch and Morris expand on the investigation Morris conducted for his just-released film of the same title, to tell the story of Abu Ghraib from the inside out and the bottom up.

Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris will be joined by Carne Ross to discuss the first full reckoning of what actually happened at Abu Grraib prison based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the Americans involved.

About Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch is the author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case. He is the editor of The Paris Review and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker.

About Errol Morris

Errol Morris is a filmmaker, the Academy Award-winning director of The Fog of War, and the recipient of a MacArthur genius award. His other films include Mr. Death, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, A Brief History of Time, and The Thin Blue Line.

About Carne Ross

Carne Ross was the UK's Iraq specialist at the United Nations Security Council from 1997-2002, where he worked on weapons of mass destruction and sanctions. After giving secret evidence to an official inquiry into the Iraq war, he resigned from the British diplomatic service and founded Independent Diplomat, the world's first non-profit diplomatic advisory group. He is author of Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite.

Best known for his acclaimed 1999 novel, The Reader, Bernhard Schlink's latest work, Homecoming, continues to examine ideas of complicity and self-deception in postwar Germany. André Aciman is a noted essayist and editor of The Proust Project. His 1994 memoir, Out of Egypt, movingly evoked several generations of his Jewish family's roots in Alexandria, and his recent novel, Call Me By Your Name, is an erotic coming-of-age saga soaked in Mediterranean sun and adolescent yearning.

Join us for a conversation with these two extraordinary authors as they probe their own creative powers to weld secret memory and history into some of the most exquisite and evocative literature today.

About André Aciman

André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt, has lived in Italy and France, and was educated at Harvard. He is the author of Out of Egypt: A Memoir, False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory, and the co-author and editor of The Proust Project and Letters of Transit. His most recent book is Call Me By Your Name. Aciman is the recipient of a Whiting Writers? Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a fellowship from The New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and Commentary.

About Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany. He is the author of the novel The Reader, as well as four prize-winning crime novels?The Gordian Knot, Self's Fraud, Self's Punishment, and Self Slaughter. His most recent novel is Homecoming. Schlink was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. He lives in Bonn and Berlin.

What is it about the reading experience that leaves such a powerful and lasting impression -particularly in the minds of future writers themselves?

Authors from the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East Annie Proulx, Olivier Rolin, Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Catherine Millet discuss the books that have touched and altered their lives, the books they continue to carry with them around the world, and the feelings of true discovery and passion these works inspired. Paul Holdengräber, director of The New York Public Library's Public Programs, leads the discussion.

About Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

Huda Saleh Yousef Al-Mohaimeed was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and has published several novels and short story collections in Arabic. In 2008 his debut novel, Wolves of the Crescent Moon, became his first book to be published outside of the Middle East. Al-Mohaimeed was presented with an award by Diwan al Arab magazine and the Egyptian Journalists Union in recognition of his creative contribution to Arab culture in 2004. 

About Catherine Millet

Catherine Millet is the author of the memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M. She is also an art critic, curator, and the founder and editor of modern art magazine Art Press. She published Dali et Moi in 2005. The English translation is to be published by Scheidegger & Spiess. 

About Antonio Muñoz Molina 

Antonio Muñoz Molina was born in Spain. He is the author of 13 novels, among them Sepharad, the English translation of which won the 2004 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. His other novels include Beatus Ille, El Jinete Polaco, Prince of Shadows, and Winter in Lisbon. His most recent book is an evocation of New York City entitled Ventanas de Manhattan. He has twice been awarded Spain's Premio Nacional de Literatura.

About Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx did not start writing until her late 50s. Since then she has received many literary awards, including the PEN-Faulkner Award, the Dos Passos Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Irish Times International Prize for her novels and short stories. A new collection of short stories, Fine Just the Way It Is, will be published in 2008.

About Olivier Rolin

Olivier Rolin was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, and spent his childhood in Senegal. Rolin has published works in fiction and non-fiction and wrote for the French daily Liberation and the weekly Nouvel Observateur. He is an editor for the French publisher Le Seuil and for the magazine Le Meilleur des mondes. His work is filled with references to May 1968 and the proletarian left while his many travels around the world make up the core of his non-fiction work. Rolin won the literay prize Prix Femina for his book Port-Soudan and Tigre en papier was nominated for the 2003 Goncourt prize.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

RIAN MALAN, LIEVE JORIS, ALEXANDRA FULLER, FRANCISCO GOLDMAN & Paul van Zyl, moderator

In countries riven by war and genocidal violence 'from South Africa and Zimbabwe, to the Congo, Rwanda and Guatemala' what, exactly, are the possibilities for truth and reconciliation? And what are the pitfalls' Join authors Rian Malan (My Traitor's Heart), Lieve Joris (The Rebels? Hour), Alexandra Fuller (Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier), and Francisco Goldman (The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?) for a far-ranging discussion. Moderated by Paul van Zyl, who served as Executive Secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, from 1995 to 1998, and is now Vice President and Program Director of the International Center for Transitional Justice.

About Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller was born in England. In 1972 she moved with her family to a farm in Rhodesia. After that country's civil war in 1981, the Fullers moved first to Malawi, then to Zambia. Fuller received a B.A. from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is the author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, a New York Times Notable Book of 2002, and a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, and Scribbling the Cat, winner of the 2005 Ulysses Award for Art of Reportage.

About Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman was born in Boston. He is the author of The Long Night of White Chickens, which won the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, and The Ordinary Seaman, which was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Fiction Prize, the PEN/Faulkner award, and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. His most recent novel is The Divine Husband and his first work of nonfiction, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, was published in 2007.

About Lieve Joris

Lieve Joris has published widely acclaimed books on the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Her translated work includes Back to the Congo, The Gates of Damascus, and Mali Blues. Her latest book, The Rebels Hour, will be published in the U.S. in April 2008. Lieve Joris was born in Belgium and now lives in Amsterdam.

About Rian Malan

Rian Malan is the author of My Traitor's Heart. He has served as a contributing editor on Rolling Stone and Esquire magazines and written articles for Time magazine, The Spectator, and The Observer, among many others.

About Paul van Zyl

Paul van Zyl is a co-founder and the Executive Vice-President of the International Center for Transitional Justice, an organization which assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. He has acted as an adviser and consultant to human rights organizations, governments, international organizations, and foundations on transitional justice issues in numerous countries. From 1995 to 1998, he served as Executive Secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Mr. van Zyl is director of New York University School of Law's Transitional Justice Program, and teaches law both in New York and Singapore.

Referring to Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex, The New York Times Book Review said, The book's length feels like its author's arms stretching farther and farther to encompass more people, more life . . . but mostly it is a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination, and of love.? Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World was hailed as 'ravishing' by the German paper Der Spiegel. Both authors books were runaway international best sellers and today they come together, admirers of each others work, to talk about making fiction from fact and much more.

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, has been translated into fifteen languages and made into a feature film. His second novel, Middlesex, received the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, France's Prix Medici, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His latest book, My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro, was published in January 2008. Jeffrey Eugenides is a Professor of Creative Writing at the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University.
 

About Daniel Kehlmann

Daniel Kehlmann attended a Jesuit college in Vienna, traveled widely, and has won several awards for previous novels and short stories, including the 2005 Candide Award. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages, and Measuring the World became an instant best seller in several European countries. Kehlmann spent the fall of 2006 as writer-in-residence at New York University's Deutsches Haus. He lives in Vienna.

About Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, has been translated into fifteen languages and made into a feature film. His second novel, Middlesex, received the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, France’s Prix Medici, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His latest book, My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro, was published in January 2008. Jeffrey Eugenides is a Professor of Creative Writing at the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University.
 

Born in Budapest, in 1950, Péter Esterházy is one of the best-known contemporary Hungarian writers, and his work stands with some of the greats of postwar literature. His novel, Revised Edition, was born from the shock he received when he discovered that his father was an informer for the Hungarian secret police during the Communist era. He'll talk about family secrets with Wayne Koestenbaum whose poetry titles include Best Selling Jewish Porn Films and The Milk of Inquiry, the novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and six nonfiction books including Hotel Theory and Andy Warhol.

Morgan Meis, founding member and President of Flux Factory Inc., will introduce the conversation.

About Péter Esterházy 

Péter Esterházy  was born in Budapest. He is the author of A Little Hungarian Pornography, She Loves Me, and Celestial Harmonies. He has received many honors, notably the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Prize at the Literary Festival in Rome and the Peace Prize at the German Book Trade at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

About Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum's publications include the nonfiction books Andy Warhol, The Queen's Throat, and Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars and Aesthetics; the novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and the poetry collections Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. His most recent book is Hotel Theory. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Visiting Professor in the Painting Department of the Yale School of Art.

Colum McCann meets with Michael Ondaatje at a very public fireplace.

Come hear these two best-selling authors both of whom are often spoken of as "international mongrels" in the sense that their backgrounds and their range of literary influences are cast extraordinarily wide. "We get our voice from the voices of others," says McCann, "and Ondaatje has long been a hero of mine." This is a fireside chat that promises to be offbeat, informal, unrehearsed and thrillingly passionate.

About Colum McCann

Colum McCann is the author of four novels and two collections of stories. He has received numerous international awards for his fiction, as well as a 2005 Oscar nomination for his short film "Everything in This Country Must." His novels have been published in 28 languages. His latest, Zoli, was published in 2007. McCann was a Fellow at The New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers during 2004-2005.

About Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka. He is the author of many works of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize in 1992; Running in the Family; and Coming Through Slaughter. He won the Governor General's Award for two of his poetry books, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning To Do. His most recent work is Divisadero, a novel. He currently resides in Toronto.

One of the most compelling issues explored by artists in recent years centers on the nature and meaning of the archive, that is, how we create, store, and circulate pictures and information.

Against the standard view of the archive which evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers and filing cabinets with historical artifacts or the dusty shelves of the library, an active archival impulse has emerged which engages the attention of contemporary artists and thinkers as a way of shaping and constructing the meaning of images.

Okwui Enwezor, curator of the exhibition Archive Fever Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography, will sit down with Paul Holdengräber to talk about the archival impulse at work in museums, libraries, and in various artistic practices. This inquiry will be followed by two conversations between first Christian Boltanski and Luc Sante, and then Lorna Simpson and George Lewis.

7:00 - 7:20 pm

Okwui Enwezor & Paul Holdengräber

7:20 - 8:00 pm

Christian Boltanski & Luc Sante

8:00 - 8:40 pm

Lorna Simpson & George Lewis

8:40 pm Q&A

This event is co-sponsored by the International Center of Photography.

About Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor is adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography and is curator of the current show at ICP, Archive Fever. Enwezor is Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute, and has been Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has held teaching positions at Columbia University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Umea, Sweden. Enwezor was Artistic Director of Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (1998-2002) and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1996-1997). He is a recipient of the College Art Association?s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Criticism and the Peter Norton Curatorial Award.

About Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski is one of France's best-known artists of the postwar generation. Boltanski has developed a highly personal and often disconcerting oeuvre that challenges basic assumptions of what constitutes an artwork. Using media as diverse as newspaper clippings, used clothes, amateur snapshots, and flickering shadows, Boltanski forges an original universe in which he is frequently the central protagonist. Internationally exhibited, Boltanski has been the recipient of the Laureate of the Praemium Imperiale, 2006, for sculpture; the Kaiser ring, Monchhausmuseum Goslar, 2001; and the Kunstpreis, 2001, given by Nord/LB, Braunschweig, Germany.

About George Lewis

George Lewis serves as the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, and as the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. Lewis's work as composer, improviser, performer and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvised forms, and is documented on more than 120 recordings. He is author of Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.

About Luc Sante

Luc Sante is a writer and critic. His books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Walker Evans, and Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005. He co-edited, with his wife, the writer Melissa Holbrook Pierson, O. K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors, and translated and edited Felix Feneon's Novels in Three Lines. Luc Sante is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Sante received a Whiting Writer's Award in 1989, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992-93, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997, and a Grammy, for album notes for the Anthology of American Folk Music, in 1998. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

About Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson is a photo-based artist and filmmaker. Emerging in the 1980s, Simpson juxtaposes photographic images of black women, seldom seen in full view, with fragmented texts. While commenting on the ways in which black women are seen, and they ways in which they see themselves, Simpson raises philosophical questions about the relationship between image and text, and about the construction of self. Widely exhibited, a touring retrospective of Simpson's work, organized by the American Federation of Arts, was seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art ? Los Angeles, the Miami Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of Art in 2006-2007. Simpson's work has also been seen at the Studio Museum of Harlem and in Documenta XI.
 

About Paul Holdengraber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

In his new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Pico Iyer gives us the first serious consideration of this worldwide leader's work and ideas as a politician, scientist, and philosopher. Having been engaged in conversation with the Dalai Lama for the last three decades, Iyer captures the paradoxes of the Dalai Lama's position: though he has brought the ideas of Tibet to world attention, Tibet itself is being remade as a Chinese province; though he was born in one of the remotest, least developed places on earth, he has become a champion of globalism and technology. Iyer illuminates the hidden life, the transforming ideas, and the daily challenges of this global icon.

Pico Iyer is the author of Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and Abandon.

About Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is the author of two novels and seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and most recently The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, a record of 34 years of traveling and talking with the XIVth Dalai Lama. His novel Abandon was translated into Russian, Turkish, and Bahasa Indonesian, among others. His articles on globalism, literature, and religion also appear often in such publications as The New York Review of Books, Harper's, the New York Times, and Time magazine. Born to Indian parents in Oxford, England, he grew up in California, was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard, and has been based for 20 years in Japan, while spending much of his time in Easter Island, North Korea, Ethiopia, and places in-between. In 1995 Iyer was named by the Utne Reader, along with the likes of Noam Chomsky and Vaclav Havel, as one of 100 visionaries worldwide who could change your life.

About Paul Holdengraber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

Is the Internet "the first social environment created for the asocial individual?"

That's what Lee Siegel argues in his new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. Siegel believes that the web and its cultural correlatives and by-products such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the bourgeois bohemian have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused self-expression with art.

Even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Join Lee Siegel, Nicholson Baker, Heidi Julavits, and Paul Holdengräber, moderator, in a blistering and wide-ranging discussion of Siegel's critique of the Internet and the social and cultural conditions from which it sprang.

About Lee Siegel

Lee Siegel is the author of the essay collections Falling Upwards and Not Remotely Controlled. Siegel has been the television critic for the New Republic, book critic for The Nation, art critic for Slate, staff writer at Harper's and Talk, contributing writer for the LA Times Book Review, associate editor of ARTnews, and associate editor of Raritan. In 2002, Siegel received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. His new book is Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.

About Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published six previous novels and three works of nonfiction, including The Size of Thoughts and Double Fold. His new book is Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.

About Heidi Julavits

Heidi Julavits is the author of three novels, most recently the Uses of Enchantment. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Harper's, Time, and The New York Times among others. She is a founding editor of The Believer, a monthly magazine published by McSweeney's, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

About Paul Holdengraber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

In October 2001, nineteen year old Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany, traveled to Pakistan to learn more about his Muslim faith. A few weeks later, on the day he was to return to Germany, Kurnaz was arrested at a police checkpoint without explanation. Kurnaz was then handed over to the U.S. military and transported to a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. After two months, Kurnaz was taken to Guantanamo and held prisoner for five years.

Murat Kurnaz? memoir, FIVE YEARS OF MY LIFE: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo, with an introduction by Patti Smith, is a powerful reminder that every day human lives are at stake. During his imprisonment, Kurnaz suffered solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, physical abuse, and sexual humiliation. Despite his best efforts to communicate his innocence, Kurnaz was charged as an ?enemy combatant? by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal in Guantanamo in September 2004.

This evening will bring together the lawyers in Germany and the U.S. who fought for Murat?s release, an ex-Guantanamo chaplain who was accused of espionage and imprisoned, and Guantanamo experts. Together they will help us understand the political and legal context, give us the perspective from the ?other side of the wire,? and deliver a picture of life in Guantanamo today.

Wallace Shawn will read from Murat Kurnaz's memoir and take part in the discussion.

About Baher Azmy

Baher Azmy is a Professor at Seton Hall Law School, where he directs a civil rights clinic and teaches constitutional law. His litigation work on national security and human rights cases emerging from the "war on terror" include lawfulness of extraordinary rendition, torture, and indefinite executive detention. In July 2004, he began representation of Murat Kurnaz imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay until his release in August 2006.

About Bernhard Docke

Bernhard Docke, a lawyer since 1983, specializes in criminal law, since 1989 partner of the law firm "Dr. Heinrich Hannover und Partner" in Bremen, Germany. He has been a lawyer for Mr. Kurnaz since 2002.

About Murat Kurnaz

Murat Kurnaz is a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany, where he was born in 1982. He was in the process of becoming a German citizen when he was arrested in Pakistan and held prisoner for five years. He now lives in Germany. His memoir is FIVE YEARS OF MY LIFE: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo.

About Michael Ratner

Michael Ratner is the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is also an attorney who represented a number of Guantanamo detainees and a professor at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School.

About Philippe Sands

Philippe Sands is an international lawyer and a professor of law at University College London. He is the author of Lawless World and is frequently a commentator on news and current affairs programs including CNN, MSNBC, and BBC World Service. He has been involved in many leading international cases, including the World Court trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the treatment of British detainees at Guantanamo Bay. His article, "The Green Light," about how high level members of the Bush administration pressured underlings to use torture tactics at Guantanamo, appears in the May 2008 issue of Vanity Fair. He is the author of Torture Team: Rumsfeld?s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. He lives in London, England.

About Wallace Shawn

Wallace Shawn is an Obie-winning playwright and a stage and screen actor. His plays include The Designated Mourner, Marie and Bruce, The Fever, and Aunt Dan and Lemon. He co-wrote and starred in the art-house classic My Dinner with Andre and he also performed in numerous Woody Allen films including Manhattan and Radio Days. Our Late Night and a Thought in Three Parts: Two Plays will be published in Spring 2008.

About James Yee

James Yee is the former US Army Muslim Chaplain of Guantanamo Bay. His book, For God And Country, Faith and Patriotism Under Fire, tells the story about being wrongly accused of espionage and imprisoned by the U.S. military. In 2004, the government dropped all charges against him and he received an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army.

In Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker, author of The Size of Thoughts and Double Fold, weaves together a chronicle of the beginnings of World War II, and presents an indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and 40s. Through a running narrative of press clippings, Baker details mankind's unstoppable descent into the madness of war from 1914 until 1941 and pierces the lies, hopes, fears, and legends we so easily imbibe on the road to war. Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization offers a new perspective on the political, social, religious, and economic events in the years preceding World War II.

About Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published six previous novels and three works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001.

About Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester is a journalist, writer and a trained geologist. His books include The Professor and the Madman, The Meaning of Everything, and Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883. His most recent book is A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906.

"Here on 42nd Street it was less elegant but no less strange," a young novelist wrote in the early fifties. "He loved this street, not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter." The passage is from Go Tell It on the Mountain. James Baldwin was one of many who got over their fear, their awe of the lions and the marble and the grandeur. He, too, walked in, and he left behind his books, a shelf of gifts in a palace of many millions.

David Remnick, The New Yorker,

May 22, 1995

James Baldwin was one of the great American prose stylists as well as an acute commentator on matters of race and gender. His collection of essays, The Price of the Ticket, a compendium of nearly fifty years of Baldwin's powerful nonfiction writing including Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time, makes clear his wisdom and eloquence. In these personal and prophetic works, he speaks to the heart of the experience of race and identity as well as to the social interaction between the races in the United States.

In addition to Baldwin's praised work, Colm Tóibín, the author of five novels including The Master, has been looking at the large body of Baldwin's uncollected writing and speeches.

Walton Muyumba will moderate a discussion with Colm Tóibín, John Edgar Wideman, Manthia Diawara, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Michael Thelwell examining James Baldwin?s lesser known works to cast a new light on his views on writers and writing, his politics, and his vision for the future of the United States.

About James Baldwin

James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, in 1924. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, established him as a profound and permanent new voice in American letters. "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else," he remarked. Soon after his debut, Baldwin's play The Amen Corner was performed at Howard University and a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, was published. A second collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, was published between his novels Giovanni's Room and Another Country. The Fire Next Time, appearing just as the civil rights movement was exploding across the American South, galvanized the nation and continues to reverberate as perhaps the most prophetic and defining statement ever written of the continuing costs of Americans' refusal to face their own history. Other works include the play, Blues for Mister Charlie; a collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man; and novels, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Just Above My Head; collections of essays, No Name in the Street, The Devil Finds Work, and The Price of the Ticket; a children's book, Little Man: A Story of Childhood; and a volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues. Baldwin's last work, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, was prompted by a series of child murders in Atlanta. In 1986 Baldwin was made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. Among the other awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Partisan Review fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. James Baldwin died at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, on December 1, 1987.

About Manthia Diawara

Manthia Diawara is Director of NYU's Institute of Afro-American Affairs and Director of the Africana Studies Program. He is the author of We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World, Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship, African Cinema: Politics and Culture, and In Search of Africa. Diawara also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in making the documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema.

About Farah Jasmine Griffin

Farah Jasmine Griffin is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of three books, "Who Set You Flowin?:" The African-American Migration Narrative; If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday; and Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever with Salim Washington. She has also edited and co-edited a number of volumes, including Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. Griffin was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library.

About Walton Muyumba

Dr. Walton Muyumba is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the The Chicago Tribune, and the Dallas Morning News. He is also a professor of American literature and African American Studies at the University of North Texas in Dallas. Dr. Muyumba's book, The Shadow and the Act: African American Intellectuals, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism is forthcoming in 2009.

related website: studio-walton muyumba

 
About Michael Thelwell 

Michael Thelwell was the founding chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of the novel The Harder They Come, which has become a classic of Jamaican literature; a collection of essays, Duties, Pleasures and Conflicts; and Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael, the memoir of the civil rights leader and Pan-Africanist revolutionary.

About Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín is the author of five novels, including The Master, which won the LA Times novel of the year in 2005, and a collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. He is Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University. Tóibín was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library.
 

About John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, and the story collection God's Gym. He is the recipient of two PEN/Faulkner Awards and has been nominated for the National Book Award. He teaches at Brown University.

• Why did the dinosaurs attack in Jurassic Park?   
• Why do historical events like The October Revolution happen?  
• Why do asteroids hit the Earth?

Hollywood has the answer: either to create a couple or to find a father. And, surprisingly, the Stalinist cinema concurs, as we can see from The Fall of Berlin, the Soviet equivalent to Warren Beatty's Reds. Family ideology is alive and well today, in our allegedly post-ideological era. So, as an antidote, it is perhaps time to revisit forgotten Hollywood masterpieces, from John Frankenheimer's Seconds to John Carpenter's They Live.

ŽIŽEK on ŽIŽEK

Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and psychoanalyst with three basic orientations: a Hegelian in philosophy, a Lacanian in psychoanalysis, a Christian materialist in religion, and a Communist in politics. Arguably the only living philosopher who uses positively the terms "dialectical materialism" and "dictatorship of the proletariat", his work triggers continuous controversy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, his analysis of 9/11, was attacked as anti-Semitic in Israel and as Zionist in Egypt. In his numerous books, he always returns to Hollywood - good cinema is for Žižek a school of critical dialectics for the uneducated masses.

About Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek, dialectical-materialist philosopher and psychoanalyst, is Co-Director of the International Center for Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. Among his latest publications are The Parallax View, How To Read Lacan, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, and, in April 2008, In Defense of Lost Causes.

"What Is Wrong with an Edible Estate?"

In 2005, Los Angeles architect and artist Fritz Haeg planted the first "edible estate" garden in Salina, Kansas the geographic center of the United States. One front lawn at a time, the Edible Estate project is replacing the domestic front lawn with a highly productive, edible, organic garden landscape. Three more prototype gardens have since been created in California, New Jersey, and England, with two more Edible Estates forthcoming in Texas and Maryland.

The publication of Haeg's new book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, marks the beginning of a concerted national campaign to dramatically overthrow an American institution, the front lawn. Gardens of food will be promoted to fill these toxic spaces that currently divide our neighborhoods, devour precious resources, and pollute our air and water.

The Edible Estates project is at the nexus of many disciplines and current topics of interest: global/local food production, art as social action, radical gardening, urban agriculture, gardening as a public spectacle, food security, water and energy use, peak oil and the uncertain future of suburbia, the blurring of public and private in the front yard, community and neighbor relations, the phenomenon of the American front lawn, etc. However, this alternative project brings with it a new set of questions.

A public debate with project creator Fritz Haeg; theater director, Peter Sellars; author and Yale professor of architecture, Dolores Hayden; author of A Short History of the American Stomach, Frederick Kaufman; 2008 Whitney Biennial curator, Shamim Momin; and director of LIVE from the NYPL, Paul Holdengräber will engage the audience in an open discussion with the question, ?What is wrong with an Edible Estate?

A projection screen will alternately display the Edible Estates videos and time-lapse images depicting the removal of the front lawn and the planting and growth of the four Edible Estates gardens in Kansas, California, New Jersey, and London.

About Fritz Haeg

Fritz Haeg works between his architecture and design practice, Fritz Haeg Studio; the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Salon; the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab, which include Edible Estates; and his role as an educator. He has variously taught in architecture, design, and fine art programs at CalArts, Art Center College of Design, Parsons, and the University of Southern California. In 2006 Haeg initiated Sundown Schoolhouse, the alternative educational environment based in his geodesic dome in Los Angeles. He has produced projects and exhibited work at the Tate Modern; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Mass MoCA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; among other institutions. His new on-going series of projects called "Animal Estates" will debut at the Whitney Biennial in 2008 with a commissioned installation in front of the museum. Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn is his first book. 

About Peter Sellars

Theater, opera, and festival director Peter Sellars is known for ground-breaking interpretations of classic works. Whether it is Mozart, Handel, Shakespeare, Sophocles, or the 16th-century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu, Sellars strikes a universal chord with audiences, engaging contemporary social and political issues. He has staged operas at the Chicago Lyric Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Netherlands Opera, the Op?ra National de Paris, and the San Francisco Opera, among others. Following his iconic stagings of Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte, Mr. Sellars established a reputation for bringing 20th-century and contemporary operas to the stage and has expanded the repertoire of modern opera. He has collaborated with John Adams on Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Ni'o, Doctor Atomic, and, most recently, A Flowering Tree. Sellars has led several major arts festivals, including the 1990/1993 Los Angeles Festivals, the 2002 Adelaide Festival in Australia; and the 2003 Venice Biennale International Festival of Theater in Italy and the 2006 festival in Vienna, New Crowned Hope, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. Sellars is a professor in the department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and a resident curator of the Telluride Film Festival. 

About Dolores Hayden

Dolores Hayden is Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University and has written extensively about the history of American urban landscapes and the politics of design. She is the author of Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000; A Field Guide to Sprawl; Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life; and The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Hayden is also a poet whose work has appeared in literary journals such as The Yale Review, Southwest Review, and The Kenyon Review. Her most recent poetry collection is American Yard.

About Frederick Kaufman

Frederick Kaufman is the author of A Short History of the American Stomach. A professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, he has written about food culture and other subjects for Harper's Magazine, Gastronomica, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, among others.

About Shamim Momin

Shamim Momin is associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and branch director and curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria. Momin was a co-curator of the 2004 Whitney Biennial and has curated numerous exhibitions for the Whitney Museum, including Terence Koh, Mark Grotjahn, Raymond Pettibon, and Banks Violette: Untitled. Exhibitions at Altria have included projects with artists such as Andrea Zittel, Rob Fischer, Sue de Beer, Mark Bradford, and Ellen Harvey. Momin has contributed essays to numerous other monograph collections, art periodicals, and exhibition catalogues, most recently as an author for the Phaidon Ice Cream series. She is co-curator of the 2008 Whitney Biennial

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

Barack Obama's Senior Foreign Policy Advisor, Samantha Power, examines in her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, the humanitarian work of Vieira de Mello who as an idealist and fierce pragmatist worked in more war zones than any other person in his generation. Described as a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy, UN Secretary General's Special Envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello died on August 19, 2003, when a suicide bomber detonated a truck of explosives in Baghdad.

Known for his adaptive and pragmatic problem-solving skills and suave negotiating tactics, Vieira de Mello had a 35-year head-start at thinking about some of the biggest questions consuming us today. Power states that Vieira de Mello had long ago stopped believing that he brought solutions to a troubled place, but he knew how to ask the questions that helped expose constructive ideas.

In conversation with Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Power will address the question, ?Who possesses the moral authority, the political sense, and the military and economic heft to protect human life and bring peace to the unruly world order. Examining the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello yields vital lessons for us today with his unique expertise on how to unite as nations, rebuild our international institutions, and establish peace and security in those parts of our world that need them the most.

About Samantha Power

Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of Global Leadership and Public Policy Practice at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Barack Obama, and a foreign policy columnist at Time magazine. In 2003, her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy. Her new book is Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World.

About Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books and Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels. Nafisi has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her cover story, "The Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution's Woman Problem" published in The New Republic, has been reprinted into several languages. Her new book, Things I Have Been Silent About, a memoir about her mother, is scheduled to be published in spring 2008.

Krista Tippett, host of public radio's Speaking of Faith, and Stuart Brown, founder of The National Institute for Play, will continue a nationally broadcasted conversation that unexpectedly became deeply connected to the relationships between the vitality of living life and of religious practices. Are faith and playfulness connected? Can healthy play be the basis for healthy spirituality? Is play more important than prayer or meditation? How do spiritual quests for a meaningful life, and a scientific study of play overlap? Or do they?

In her book, Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How to Talk About It, Tippett brings tolerance, compassion, understanding, and the exploration of evil and virtue into perspectives through her life experiences and personal interviews with worldwide luminaries. Her expositions of her paths from fundamentalism to agnosticism to a faith-based embrace of the mysteries of existence deliver enchantment.

Brown's path toward "enlightenment" is of a different perspective. From a detailed study of murderers who had never engaged in play, to chasing animals at play in the wild worldwide, to becoming immersed in the developmental neurobiology of play, he finds much empathy and parallelism with the wisdom that Tippett has discovered on her spiritual life path.

Stuart Brown finds play ?takes one out of time? into eternities?sunrise while Tippett's explorations frame our inherent quest for answers through faith and ritual. Paul Holdengräber will ignite the fuel for discovery as these two explorers from different continents encounter themselves in a deep dialogue.

About Stuart Brown

Trained in medicine, psychiatry, and clinical research, Stuart Brown discovered the importance of play by discerning its absence in a studied group of homicidal young males. As Clinical Director and Chief of Psychiatry at Mercy Hospital and a professor at University of California, San Diego, he interviewed thousands of people to capture their play profiles identifying negative consequences in a play-deprived life. After his clinical career, he became the founder of The National Institute for Play. With the support of the National Geographic Society and Jane Goodall, he observed animal play in the wild and began to see play as a long evolved behavior important for the well being and survival of animals. He subsequently came to understand that humans are uniquely designed by nature to enjoy and participate in play throughout life.

About Krista Tippett

A journalist and former diplomat, Krista Tippett conceived the idea for Speaking of Faith while consulting for the ecumenical institute of St. John's Abbey, Collegeville. She has hosted and produced the now national weekly program at American Public Media since it began in 2000. Tippett is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and a former Fulbright Scholar. In divided Berlin in the 1980's, she reported for The New York Times, Newsweek, the BBC, among others, and served as special assistant to the U.S. ambassador to the former West Germany. Her first book, Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How to Talk About It, was published in 2007.

About Paul Holdengraber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

"My work is my diary," Picasso said, and John Richardson addresses his paintings and sculptures in that light: not only as the stunning manifestation of the artist's protean imagination but also as a mirror, held up to the man himself, in which we can see what might otherwise have been hidden.

John Richardson's new book, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, is the third volume of a biography that reveals the artist's life during the time that he created some of his most important sculpture and painting. These are the years that Picasso was part of a group in Paris that included Braque, Apollinaire, Miró, Man Ray, and Breton, and when in the south of France, spent summers in the company of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. It was during this time that he was married to the ballerina Olga Khokhlova and had his passionate affair with Marie-Thérèse  Walter, who was, as well, his model and muse.

About John Richardson 

John Richardson is the author of a memoir, The Sorcerer's Apprentice; an essay collection, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters; and books on Manet and Braque. He has written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. He was instrumental in establishing Christie's in the United States. In 1993, he was made a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and from 1995 to 1996, he served as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. He divides his time between Connecticut and New York City.

About Robert Hughes 

Robert Hughes has written for such publications as The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, and The Observer in London and was art critic for Time magazine for thirty years. His books include The Culture of Complaint, Barcelona, The Fatal Shore, Nothing If Not Critical, Heaven and Hell in Western Art, Goya, and most recently Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir. His television series include The Shock Of The New, American Visions, and Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore, as well as numerous documentaries, most recently Goya: Crazy Like a Genius. Hughes is the only art critic to twice receive the Frank Jewett Mather Award, given by the College Art Association of America. He lives in New York.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture

The New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, will discuss genocide in Darfur based on his eight trips to the region, and the challenges of covering neglected stories from the developing world that the U.S. and other nations have failed to address. This presentation will be illustrated with photos and a video from Darfur.

About Nicholas Kristof

Nicholas Kristof writes op-ed columns for The New York Times. His columns have often focused on global health, poverty and gender issues in the developing world. Since 2004 he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area eight times. He has received two Pulitzer Prizes?one for his reporting with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, on China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement and the other for his reporting on Darfur. He has been a Times correspondent since 1984, becoming an associate managing editor and the first blogger on The New York Times Website. Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to 120 countries, plus all 50 states, every Chinese province and every main Japanese island. Kristof and WuDunn are authors of China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia.

 About The Robert B. Silvers Lecture

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky in recognition of the work of Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, of which he was a founder in 1963. The series features contemporary people whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silver?s interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

In Lost Paradise: A Novel, eminent Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom weaves an imaginative tale of two unrelated travelers a beautiful stranger aboard a Berlin-bound flight and a haggard-looking man on a Holland train platform whose intersecting paths illuminate the ways in which the divine touches our lives. With his fleeting impressions of these encounters, Nooteboom builds a complex, haunting story of longing, regret, and rebirth in the dawn of the new millennium.

Nooteboom writes about the ecstasy, and ultimately the frustration of grasping onto something doomed to disappear or the unwillingness to resign oneself to an inescapable farewell. The simple conclusion to a complicated love story is that angels don't belong with humans. Lost Paradise is a novel as light and ungraspable as a poem, yet seems to be about everything in life, including the fall from grace and cosmically thwarted love while affirming our underlying humanity in an increasingly fragmented age.

About Cees Nooteboom

Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom debuted in 1955 with the novel Philip and the Others and has since written novels, poetry, short stories and travelogues. His work has earned him numerous awards, among which the Bordewijk Prize, the Pegasus Prize for Rituals and the Aristeion European Prize for Literature for The Following Story. The latter was translated into over twenty languages and signaled his international breakthrough. In 2004 he was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize for his entire oeuvre. Among his other books are the travelogues Berlin Notes, Roads to Santiago, and the novels All Souls? Day and his latest book, Lost Paradise: A Novel.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

"I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so." Oscar Wilde

How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read

• Ways of Not Reading: Books You Don't Know; Books You Have Skimmed; Books You Have Heard of.  
• Literary Confrontations: Encounters with Professors; Enco  
• Ways of Behaving: Not Being Ashamed; Inventing Books.

?from the Table of Contents

Umberto Eco insists that he read Pierre Bayard's book, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read or at least skimmed it. In the July 26th edition of L’Espresso Eco writes, ?The most intriguing part of this pamphlet, less paradoxical than may first appear, is that we forget a high percentage of the books we actually read, in fact, we conjure a virtual image of sorts, not so much of what the book said, but of what it made us think about.?

On Ugliness is an extraordinary road map to the perception of the grotesque over the centuries. Following on the heels of the book, History of Beauty, writer and scholar Umberto Eco considers how we perceive and define the corollary the depiction of ugliness the complete absence of beauty from Ancient Greece to the present day.

Eco begins his fascinating discussion with the observation that the aesthetics of beauty have been defined and documented through the ages by philosophers, artists, and writers, while the same cannot be said for ugliness. Though ostensibly opposites, one thing beauty and ugliness share is the fact that they are defined by the culture and by the times what is ugly in Paris may be beautiful in Papua, and what was beautiful in the 19th century, may be considered ugly in the 21st. Quoting from Hegel and Nietzsche, Plutarch, Aristotle and Darwin, Eco identifies three different phenomena: ugliness in itself, formal ugliness, and the artistic portrayal of both. As Eco states, we can almost always infer what the first two types of ugliness were [in a given time in history, and a particular society] solely based on the evidence of the third type.

Eco intertwines his own lively, provocative text with the writings of philosophers, novelists, and poets to explore his subject matter which includes:

• Ugliness in the classical world such as pagan monsters and mythological creatures whose ugly forms reinforce their frightening cultural purpose

• The ugly side of Christianity as demonstrated by vivid depictions of the suffering of Christ and the Crucifixion, the martyrdom of saints, and the concept of Death

•The apocalypse, hell, and the devil to symbolize the consequences of digression from the path of faith

• The ugly, the comic, the obscene examines satire and caricature

•The ugliness of woman in the analysis of the demonization of women by men to reveal their supposed malice and threatening sexual powers

•Deformity, birth defects, and disfiguring disease along with distasteful racial and religious stereotyping by physiognomy

• Ugliness made manifest through disturbing events, fear-filled dreams, horror and fantasy

• The ugliness inherent in industrialization of society and the low life of poverty

• The avant-garde and how it demonstrates the evolution of the acceptance of the ugly in art

•The ugliness of kitsch and camp a social phenomenon defined by taste distinctions of class and wealth

• Ugliness today in the selected writings of Stephen King and Italo Calvino, images of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Wars? Yoda, and performer Marilyn Manson

In Turning Back The Clock, Hot Wars and Media Populism, the time is 2000 to 2005, the years of neoconservatism, terrorism, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the ascension of Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Umberto Eco's response is a provocative, passionate, and witty series of essays which originally appeared in the Italian newspapers La Repubblica and L’Espresso that leaves no slogan unexamined, no innovation unexposed. What led us into this age of hot wars and media populism, and how was it sold to us as progress Eco discusses such topics as racism, mythology, the European Union, rhetoric, the Middle East, technology, September 11, medieval Latin, television ads, globalization, Harry Potter, anti-Semitism, logic, the Tower of Babel, intelligent design, Italian street demonstrations, fundamentalism, The Da Vinci Code, and magic and magical thinking.

Eco shows his practical, engaged side: an intellectual involved in events both local and global, a man concerned about taste, politics, education, ethics, and where our troubled world is headed.

About Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco teaches Semiotics and is the President of the Scuola superiore di Studi Umanistici at the University of Bologna. In 1980 Eco debuted as a novelist with The Name of the Rose for which he received the Strega Award. Since then his books include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Amongst his essays are The Open Work, A Theory of Semiotics, The Role of the Reader, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, The Limits of Interpretation, The Search for the Perfect Language, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Kant and the Plathypus, and On Literature. He is the author of the History of Beauty. His new books are On Ugliness and Turning Back The Clock, Hot Wars and Media Populism. 

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

Caryl Phillips: "I'd like to hear about Ian Buruma's experiences of belonging and feeling an outsider in England, and any literature or art forms that have helped him understand the English or notions of being an outsider... Ian's book on the murder of Theo Van Gogh takes the debate about identity and belonging in Europe beyond issues of race and class and tackles the important place we're now at, which is grappling with notions of faith and Islam. I'm very interested in the role that literature can play in negotiating a middle passage between a politically sponsored monocultural approach and an equally potentially treacherous multicultural alternative."

Ian Buruma: "A strand running through Caryl Phillips' new book Foreigners (and to some extent even mine, about Theo van Gogh) is the overlap between race and class. Britain, in comparison to Holland, say, or Germany, was perhaps always more class than race oriented--hence the fact that Indian aristocrats could play for the English cricket team, or enter English clubs--something less common in other European empires."

Caryl Phillips new book Foreigners is a hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society.

Together Caryl Phillips and Ian Buruma will discuss notions of identity, belonging, race, class, anti-semitism, and faith and Islam, which affect present-day Europe, reflecting on how these issues are examined in literature and the broader culture.

About Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, and brought up in England. He is the author of three books of nonfiction and eight novels. His most recent book, Dancing in the Dark, won the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award; A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Prize. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and currently lives in New York. His new book is Foreigners.

About Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma was born in the Netherlands. He studied Chinese at Leyden University and cinema at Nihon University in Tokyo. Living in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Berlin, Washington DC, London, Oxford, and New York City, he has worked as a journalist, filmmaker, and author. His latest book, Murder in Amsterdam, won the LA Times Book Award. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and Henry Luce Professor at Bard College. He lives in Milan, New York.

"My first memory is of a dark landing of a Budapest tenement building, as we are flying toward and then smashing into a wall ablaze with cold flames. Or, perhaps it is not we who are flying but the flaming walls are falling on us. Someone is holding me as I am flying high above the stairs. Then, there are no more cold flames, no more falling, and no more up and down, just darkness, warmth, and nothingness. This memory must date from the second year of my life, from the time of the more than three-month long siege of Budapest." Péter Nádas has had a major presence in European life and letters: as a trenchant commentator on the events that have transformed his country and all of Europe since 1989, as a stunning literary critic, as a subtle interpreter of language and politics in societies both free and unfree, and as a moralist with a discerning eye for the crippling effects of deception and hypocrisy upon us all.

His new book, Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays, acquaints us more fully with Nádas's evolution as a writer of fiction, for it includes stories dating from the 1960s and 1970s, when he had to write in extremely stringent, even dangerous circumstances, as well as some from more recent years, since the publication of his major novels and the reintegration of Western and Eastern Europe.

About Péter Nádas

Writer, essayist, critic, and playwright Péter Nádas makes his home in Gombosszeg, a small village in western Hungary. His writings include collections of essays (Stage Set, On Heavenly and Earthly Love, Dialogue, Scrapes of Paper and other Miscellaneous Writings, Essays), novellas (Yearbook and Procession), and novels (A Book of Memories and Parallel Stories). His new book is Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

On the 60th anniversary of Orwell's Politics and the English Language, George Orwell described political speech as consisting ?largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Some six decades later, many symptoms of manipulation and propaganda diagnosed by Orwell persist on the American political landscape, along with new disinformation techniques enabled by modern technology.

Historians, scientists, philosophers, linguists, cognitive experts, journalists, image-makers, and public figures will debate in three separate sessions the current state of political discourse?and journalism's response to it on the dawn of a bitterly contested presidential campaign.

Part I Propaganda Then and Now: What Orwell Did and Didn't Know

Part II Deceiving Images: The Science of Manipulation

Part III Solutions: The Future Political Landscape

Each session will explore the past, present, and future of deceptive political speech, and assess what can be done to bring more realism and honesty into the conduct of America?s public affairs.

This event is co-sponsored by the Open Society Institute.

III. SOLUTIONS: THE FUTURE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

Moderator:

Ernest J. Wilson III, dean and Walter Annenberg Chair in Communication, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California

Panelists:

Michael J. Copps, commissioner, Federal Communications Commission

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, broadcast journalist, former CNN bureau chief, and chief national correspondent, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer

Josh Marshall, publisher of Talking Points Memo, TPMmuckraker, TPM Election Central, and TPMCafe

Alessandra Stanley, television critic and former Moscow-bureau co-chief, The New York Times

About Michael J. Copps

Michael J. Copps was sworn in for a second term as a member of the Federal Communications Commission in January 2006. His term runs until 2010. From 1998 to 2001, he was assistant secretary of commerce for trade development at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he worked to improve market access and market share for nearly every sector of American industry and devoted much of his time to building private sector-public sector partnerships. From 1993 to 1998, he served as deputy assistant secretary for basic industries, a component of the Trade Development Unit. Mr. Copps moved to Washington, D.C., in 1970, joined the staff of Senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC), and served for more than a dozen years as his administrative assistant and chief of staff. He has been director of government affairs for a Fortune 500 company and senior vice president for legislative affairs at a major national trade association. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has taught history at Loyola University of the South. A native of Milwaukee, he lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

About Charlayne Hunter-Gault

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is a journalist and international correspondent who has reported for PBS, NPR, and most recently CNN, as Johannesburg bureau chief. She was the chief national correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS from 1983 to 1997. During her tenure at the NewsHour, which she joined in 1978, she won two Emmys, a Peabody for excellence in broadcast journalism, and a Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She has been an editor for Trans-Action Magazine, a reporter at The New Yorker, and an investigative reporter and anchorwoman on WRC-TV's evening news. She later joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter covering the urban African-American community. She has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Saturday Review, The New York Times Book Review, Essence, and Vogue. Born in Due West, South Carolina, she made civil-rights history as the first African-American woman to enter the University of Georgia, the topic of her memoir In My Place. She has received more than two dozen honorary degrees.

About Josh Marshall

Josh Marshall is the publisher of Talking Points Memo, TPMmuckraker, TPM Election Central and TPMCafe. He also writes a weekly column for the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill. His articles on politics and foreign affairs have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers across the United States as well as abroad, including The American Prospect, The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, The Financial Times, , The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Post, The New York Times, Salon and Slate. Marshall graduated from Princeton in 1991 and holds a doctorate in American history from Brown. He lives in New York City with his wife Millet, their son Sam, and their dog Simon.

About Alessandra Stanley

Alessandra Stanley was named chief television critic for The New York Times in 2003. Before that, she was a foreign correspondent for the newspaper, serving as Rome bureau chief (1998-2001) and co-chief of the Moscow bureau (1994-1998). She has also covered national politics and metropolitan news for the Times. Ms. Stanley has served as a writer and correspondent for Time, working in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, and finally, Washington, D.C., covering The White House and presidential campaigns. While at Time, she reported from Central America, Afghanistan, Asia and Africa. She has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, GQ and Vogue. Born in Boston, MA, Ms. Stanley grew up in Washington, D.C. and Europe, and studied literature at Harvard University. She lives in New York City with her daughter.

About Ernest J. Wilson III

Ernest J. Wilson III became dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication in July 2007. He was previously a professor and senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was director of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management. He has also served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarship focuses on the convergence of communication and information technology, public policy, and the public interest. His current work concentrates on China-Africa relations, global sustainable innovation, and the role of politics in the diffusion of communications technology. Nominated by President Bill Clinton and reappointed by President George W. Bush, Dean Wilson is the ranking senior member of the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He has also held positions with the National Security Council, the U.S. Information Agency, and the Global Information Infrastructure Commission. Originally from Washington, D.C., he earned a B.A. from Harvard College Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

On the 60th anniversary of Orwell's Politics and the English Language, George Orwell described political speech as consisting largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Some six decades later, many symptoms of manipulation and propaganda diagnosed by Orwell persist on the American political landscape, along with new disinformation techniques enabled by modern technology.

Historians, scientists, philosophers, linguists, cognitive experts, journalists, image-makers, and public figures will debate in three separate sessions the current state of political discourse and journalism's response to it on the dawn of a bitterly contested presidential campaign.

Part I Propaganda Then and Now: What Orwell Did and Didn't Know

Part II Deceiving Images: The Science of Manipulation

Part III Solutions: The Future Political Landscape

Each session will explore the past, present, and future of deceptive political speech, and assess what can be done to bring more realism and honesty into the conduct of America's public affairs.

This event is co-sponsored by the Open Society Institute.

II. DECEIVING IMAGES: THE SCIENCE OF MANIPULATION

Moderator:

Nicholas Lemann, dean and Henry R. Luce Professor, The Journalism School, Columbia University

Panelists:

George Lakoff, Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, UC Berkeley; senior fellow, Rockridge Institute

Frank Luntz, political pollster and consultant; author of Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear

Deborah Tannen, University Professor and professor of linguistics, Georgetown University; author of fourteen books on language, communication, and perception

Drew Westen, professor of psychology/psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Emory University; author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation

About George Lakoff

George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute, where he studies the framing of issues in politics. He is one of the world's best-known linguists and a founder of the field of cognitive science. He has published hundreds of articles and numerous books on linguistics, psychology, poetics, philosophy, and mathematics. Among his works on mind and language are Metaphors We Live By (with Mark Johnson); Moral Politics; Don't Think of an Elephant!; and Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points (with the Rockridge Institute). His next book, The Political Mind is an introduction to recent scientific results about the brain and mind that have a bearing on politics. As a private citizen, he helps progressive citizens' groups, activists, and policy makers think through their values and principles, formulate policies, and frame issues to express their deepest beliefs more effectively.

About Nicholas Lemann

Nicholas Lemann is dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Lemann has published five books, most recently Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT; and The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and American Heritage; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Frontline, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities. Lemann continues to write for The New Yorker and serves on the boards of directors of the Authors Guild, the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Society of American Historians, and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives with his family in New York City.

About Frank Luntz

Frank Luntz has been called the "hottest pollster" in America by The Boston Globe, and was named one of four "top research minds" by Business Week. He was the winner of the coveted Washington Post "Crystal Ball" award for being the most accurate pundit in 1992. Luntz has written, supervised, and conducted more than 1,500 surveys, focus groups, and dial sessions in more than two dozen countries and four continents over the past decade, and is the pioneer of the "instant response" focus-group technique. He consults Fortune 100 companies ? from General Motors to Federal Express, Disney to American Express, AT&T to Pfizer, Kroger supermarkets to McDonald's and the entire soft-drink and motion-picture industries, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable on communication and language. He also served as a consultant to the award-winning NBC hit show The West Wing. He is the author of Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear.

About Deborah Tannen

Deborah Tannen is a University Professor and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. In addition to her fourteen academic books and more than a hundred articles, she has written six books for general audiences, including You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for nearly four years and has been translated into twenty-nine languages. The Argument Culture won the Common Ground Book Award. She has received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and has received five honorary doctorates. She is a frequent guest on television and radio news and information shows. Her first play, An Act of Devotion, is included in Best American Short Plays 1993-1994.

About Drew Westen

Drew Westen is a clinical, personality, and political psychologist and a professor in the departments of psychology/psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University. As the founder of Westen Strategies, a consulting firm, he advises Democratic leaders and candidates. He holds a B.A. from Harvard, an M.A. in social and political thought from the University of Sussex (England), and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. He has been chief psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He is a blogger for The Huffington Post and a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. His book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, explores how politicians can capture the hearts and minds of voters through examples of what candidates have said or could have said in debates, speeches, and ads. He lives in Atlanta.

On the 60th anniversary of Orwell's Politics and the English Language, George Orwell described political speech as consisting largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Some six decades later, many symptoms of manipulation and propaganda diagnosed by Orwell persist on the American political landscape, along with new disinformation techniques enabled by modern technology.

Historians, scientists, philosophers, linguists, cognitive experts, journalists, image-makers, and public figures will debate in three separate sessions the current state of political discourse?and journalism's response to it? on the dawn of a bitterly contested presidential campaign.

Part I Propaganda Then and Now: What Orwell Did and Didn't Know

Part II Deceiving Images: The Science of Manipulation

Part III Solutions: The Future Political Landscape

Each session will explore the past, present, and future of deceptive political speech, and assess what can be done to bring more realism and honesty into the conduct of America?s public affairs.

This event is co-sponsored by the Open Society Institute.

I. PROPAGANDA THEN AND NOW: WHAT ORWELL DID AND DIDN'T KNOW

Moderator:

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director, Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society; former dean, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Panelists:

Konstanty Gebert, Warsaw-based former Solidarity activist; columnist and international reporter, Gazeta Wyborcza

Masha Gessen, Moscow-based author and journalist; contributor to The New York Times, The New Republic, and US News and World Report

Jack Miles, senior fellow for religious affairs, Pacific Council on International Policy; distinguished professor of English and religious studies, UC Irvine

George Soros, chair of Soros Fund Management LLC; philanthropist and author

About Konstanty Gebert 

Konstanty Gebert, a former dissident activist, is a columnist and international reporter for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and a frequent contributor to international media. He was the co-founder of the (unofficial) Jewish Flying University in 1979, and of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews in 1980. In September 1980, he co-founded a white-collar trade union that soon merged with Solidarity, the independent self-governing trade union that precipitated the downfall of Polish Communism. After avoiding internment in the 1981 coup, Gebert became, under the pen name of Dawid Warszawski, a well-known editor and columnist for various underground publications. The author of eight books, he has served as a visiting professor at a number of American universities. He lives in Warsaw.

About Masha Gessen 

Masha Gessen is an author and a journalist living in Moscow. Her books about Russia are Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace and Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism. She has written for and worked at many publications in Russia and the United States, including The New Republic, The New York Times, US News and World Report, Bolshoy Gorod, Itogi, and The Moscow Times. She was born in Moscow, emigrated to the United States with her family in 1981, and returned to Moscow as a reporter in the early 1990s. In addition to Russia, she has reported from the Balkans.

About Jack Miles 

Jack Miles is senior fellow for religious affairs of the Pacific Council on International Policy and Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine. A former MacArthur fellow, Miles won the Pulitzer Prize for God: A Biography, which has been translated into sixteen languages. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. Miles was a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before earning a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages from Harvard. He is fluent in several modern languages. He serves on the final selection committee of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. A former literary editor and member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board, he is currently general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

About Orville Schell 

Orville Schell is the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and the recently appointed Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York City. He is the author of more than a dozen books, nine of them about China, and a frequent contributor to major newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, The China Quarterly, and The New York Review of Books. He has served as a television commentator for several network news programs, worked both as correspondent and a consultant for PBS Frontline documentaries, and been the correspondent for an Emmy Award-winning 60 Minutes segment. He divides his time between Berkeley and New York City.

About George Soros

George Soros is chair of Soros Fund Management LLC. Born in Budapest, he survived the Nazi occupation and fled Communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics. He then settled in the United States, where he accumulated a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. An active philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend Cape Town University in apartheid South Africa, Soros has established a network of philanthropic organizations in more than fifty countries. These organizations are dedicated to promoting the values of democracy and an open society. The foundation network spends about $450 million annually. Soros is the author of nine books, including most recently The Age of Fallibility. His articles and essays on politics, society, and economics regularly appear in major newspapers and magazines around the world. He lives in New York City.

Blind Spot is the international source book of photography-based fine art for artists, collectors, creative directors, designers, curators and art lovers. Blind Spot publishes new works by the world's most renowned artists and discovers vital new work by up-and-coming artists. The collaboration of the editors and the ideas expressed by the individual artists make each issue of Blind Spot emerge as a single work of art. Fourteen years old, Blind Spot has gained an international reputation for being a visual magazine that does not talk about imagery the content is imagery.

Collapsing Images Forum

As a counter-point to the visual conversation provided by the magazine, the Collapsing Images Forum aims to give a voice to the issues surrounding photography, and discuss the role of photography in the media and popular culture. Collapsing Images presents three vital discussions led by leading photographers, filmmakers and critics.

Part I A Conversation between Jack Pierson & Jerry Schatzberg (2:00 pm)

Part II Money, Money, Money, Money (4:30 pm)

Part III Truth and Authenticity in Photography (7:30 pm)

This event is co-sponsored by Blind Spot in association with Fred & Associates.

Part III TRUTH AND AUTHENTICITY IN PHOTOGRAPHY

How does a photographer negotiate between "documenting" and "creating What is "truth" in photography Other issues to address are the commodification of biography and the viewer/consumer's visceral hunger for vicarious experience and search for authenticity via the artist.

Moderator: Elisabeth Sussman

Panelists: Mitch Epstein, Paul Graham, Katy Grannan, Danny Lyon, and Tod Papageorge

About Mitch Epstein

Mitch Epstein's photographs are in numerous major museum collections, including New York's Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His current project, American Power, examines energy usage and the idea of excess in the United States. His recent books include Mitch Epstein: Work and Family Business. Epstein is the recipient of the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters, Spring 2008, from the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

About Paul Graham

Paul Graham is a British photographer whose work operates at the point where the documentary and artistic aspects of the medium coalesce. Graham was the first photographer to unite New Color photography with the sensibility of British social documentary, and in so doing he reinvigorated and expanded this area of practice, questioning our notions of what such 'documentary' photography can say, be, or look like. He has published over 10 books, including a Phaidon 'Contemporary Artists' monograph, and his work has been exhibited widely, most notably a one person show at the Tate Gallery, London, and the Venice Biennale. He has just published A Shimmer of Possibility, a 12-volume set of books by Steidl.

About Katy Grannan

Katy Grannan received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Orange County Museum of Art, among others. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies, The International Center of Photography, and has been featured in ArtForum, Frieze, Art on Paper, Art and Auction, Visionaire, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. Her monograph, Model American was published by Aperture.

About Danny Lyon

Danny Lyon was born in Brooklyn to Russian and German parents and grew up in Queens, NY. He studied history at University of Chicago and is self-taught in photography. He was a member and photographer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1963-64, and the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, 1965-66. Lyon has been an independent photographer since 1962 and a filmmaker since 1969. He was an associate photographer for Magnum Photos, 1967-75, and a writer and essayist since 1973. He is a self-publisher, with Nancy Lyon since 1980 and Michael Hausman, as Bleak Beauty Books, since 1988. Lyon received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, 1969, and in filmmaking, 1979 and a Rockefeller Fellowship in filmmaking. 1990. He was a teacher of non-fiction film at SUNY/Buffalo and at Columbia University, and a photography teacher at Queensborough Community College. His latest book, Like A Thief's Dream, is the non-fiction story of an Arkansas murder. Danny Lyon: Montage, Film, and Still Photography will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until December 2, 2007.

About Tod Papageorge

Tod Papageorge earned his BA in English literature from the University of New Hampshire in 1962, where he began taking photographs during his last semester. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. In 1979, Papageorge was named the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the Yale School of Art, a position he continues to hold today. As the director of the graduate program in photography at the School, he has taught and supervised the course of study of many of the strongest American photographers of the last 30 years. His work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in the collections of more than 30 major museums. In addition, he has written seminal essays on Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Robert Adams.

About Elisabeth Sussman

Elisabeth Sussman is Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her recent exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure is currently on tour to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles followed by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Next for the Whitney, Elisabeth will be co-curating a retrospective exhibition of the work of William Eggleston. She has organized a number of other Whitney exhibitions including Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing (2005); Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1991); Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror (1996), with David Armstrong; Keith Haring (1997); and the Museum's 1993 Biennial Exhibition. She has recently co-curated two NYC exhibitions on the work of Eva Hesse at The Drawing Center and the Jewish Museum. For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sussman co-organized, with Renate Petzinger of the Museum Wiesbaden, a full retrospective on the work of Eva Hesse which received the International Art Critics Association First Prize for the best monographic exhibition outside of New York in 2001 and 2002. For SFMOMA, Sussman also organized, with Sandra Phillips, a retrospective of the work of Diane Arbus. The catalogue for the Arbus exhibition received the 2004 Infinity Award for Publication of the International Center of Photography. Sussman has been a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, and at the Getty Research Institute. She is the author of many publications, including Lisette Model and has contributed essays on Robert Gober for the Schaulager and Lee Bontecou for an upcoming exhibition catalogue.

Blind Spot is the international source book of photography-based fine art for artists, collectors, creative directors, designers, curators and art lovers. Blind Spot publishes new works by the world's most renowned artists and discovers vital new work by up-and-coming artists. The collaboration of the editors and the ideas expressed by the individual artists make each issue of Blind Spot emerge as a single work of art. Fourteen years old, Blind Spot has gained an international reputation for being a visual magazine that does not talk about imagery the content is imagery.

Collapsing Images Forum

As a counter-point to the visual conversation provided by the magazine, the Collapsing Images Forum aims to give a voice to the issues surrounding photography, and discuss the role of photography in the media and popular culture. Collapsing Images presents three vital discussions led by leading photographers, filmmakers and critics.

Part I A Conversation between Jack Pierson & Jerry Schatzberg (2:00 pm)

Part II Money, Money, Money, Money (4:30 pm)

Part III Truth and Authenticity in Photography (7:30 pm)

This event is co-sponsored by Blind Spot in association with Fred & Associates.

Part II MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

In an era when creativity and innovation have a price tag and the lines between art and commerce are increasingly blurred, how do artists negotiate this terrain Are commercial entities like Prada, Apple and Louis Vuitton modern-day Medicis or are these corporations and their consigliere simply bandits brokering on the fame of the artist  Is art in the service of commerce or vice versa?

Moderator: Glenn O'Brien

Panelists: Vince Aletti, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Dennis Freedman, Doug Lloyd, Glen Luchford, Collier Schorr, Andy Spade

About Vince Aletti

Vince Aletti reviews photography exhibitions for the New Yorker's Goings on About Town section and writes a regular column about photography books for Photograph magazine. He contributes features and reviews to Aperture, Art + Auction, Art & Antiques, and Photoworks. He was the art editor of the Village Voice from 1994 to 2005, and the paper's photo critic for 20 years. He is the winner of the International Center of Photography's 2005 Infinity Award in writing.

About Philip Lorca diCorcia

Philip Lorca diCorcia's work is frequently shown in exhibitions addressing our cultural zeitgeist. At the beginning of his career in the late 1970s, diCorcia situated his friends and family within fictional interior tableaus. He later shifted his attention outward, photographing strangers in urban spaces Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome, Tokyo and infused the pictures with supplementary lighting to achieve a sense of heightened drama. DiCorcia received his first solo show in 1985 and has had one-person exhibitions worldwide, including those at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre National de la Photographie (Paris), the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Art Space Ginza (Tokyo), and the Sprengel Museum (Hanover). In 2001, diCorcia won the Infinity Award for Applied Photography from the International Center for Photography in New York.

About Dennis Freedman

Dennis Freedman is Creative Director of W Magazine. He is responsible for the creative transformation of the magazine, which was relaunched in 1993. In his capacity as Creative Director, Dennis has initiated collaborations with the most influential photographers in the world, including Craig McDean, Bruce Weber, David Sims, Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, Mario Testino, Mario Sorrenti, Mert Atlas and Marcus Piggott, Juergen Teller, Philip Lorca diCorcia, Chuck Close, and Richard Prince. His efforts have earned the publication three National Magazine Awards for Photography. In 2007, Dennis established his own agency, Dennis Freedman Studio. Campaigns that he has worked on include Dolce and Gabbana, Calvin Klein Jeans, and D&G with Steven Klein, Helmut Lang and Celine with Bruce Weber, and a new Coty Fragrance for Marc Jacobs with Juergen Teller.

About Douglas Lloyd

Douglas Lloyd is CEO and creative director of Lloyd (+co), a high-end fashion advertising agency which he founded 11 years ago. His clients include Gucci, Est'e Lauder, Movado, Theory, Club Monaco, Glac au/Vitamin Water, and Oscar de la Renta. Lloyd has also collaborated on several projects with non-profit organizations such as the Whitney Museum of Art, the Dali Lama Foundation, the CFDA, Free Arts Organization, and the Judd Foundation. With a focus on fashion, beauty and fragrance, Lloyd (+ co) and Douglas Lloyd specialize in branding, strategic positioning, advertising, collateral, sales and public relations support, logo development, graphic design, and product consultation. The agency also works in publishing on books and magazines. Design awards won by Lloyd include the New York Type Directors Club, Photo Design, and American Photography, as well as many FIFI awards over the last 10 years.

About Glen Luchford

Glen Luchford's rich and dramatic photo images reveal an intense cinematic style that spans fashion, portraiture and contemporary art. His work for clients including Prada, Yves Saint Laurent, Levis, Mercedes Benz, VW, Sanyo, Parliament, Davidoff and Calvin Klein, has resulted in some of the most memorable campaigns of recent years. His portraits of leading cultural figures including Dennis Hopper, Willem Defoe, Madonna, Bjork and Tilda Swinton, have been commissioned by international publications. His seductive and imaginative fashion editorial work is regularly featured in leading magazines such as Italian, Paris and American Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Another and W. Luchford's fashion photography has been exhibited at The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Photographers Gallery, London, and MoMA Queens as part of Fashioning Fiction (2004). In 2000, Luchford completed a feature length film From Here to Where, which was nominated for the Michael Powell Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001.

About Glenn O'Brien

Glenn O'Brien was a student at Columbia University when he landed a job at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine where he became editor and art director. He has run the New York bureau of Rolling Stone, was articles editor of Playboy's alternative skin magazine, Oui, and worked at High Times magazine. In 1976 he formed the band Konelrad--the world's first socialist-realist rock band and in 1978 he launched Glenn O'Brien's TV Party on Manhattan Cable TV's public access channel. In 1981 he wrote and produced the film Downtown 81, starring Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the mid-'80s he began a second career in advertising as a copywriter for Barney's New York and becoming creative director of Barney's Advertising. O'Brien's work appears regularly in GQ, Vanity Fair, Italia, and Paper, among others. His books include The Style Guy, Soapbox (essays), and the poetry collection Human Nature (dub version). He is editor of the literary magazine Bald Ego and has a novel forthcoming.

About Collier Schorr

Collier Schorr was born in New York in 1963. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, Walker Art Center, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among many others. Schorr's solo exhibition "There I was", at 303 Gallery, New York opened in September 2007 and SteidlMack will publish a book of this work in December 2007. A solo exhibition of Schorr's "Jens F." work will appear at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. In 2007 Collier Schorr's "Forest and Fields: Neighbors" was on view at the Badischer Kunstverein Germany, and in 2008 the exhibition will travel to Le Consortium, Dijon, France. SteidlMack published a book of this work in 2006. Schorr was awarded the Guna S Mundheim Fellow, American Academy, Berlin in 2007 and will complete a residency in 2008. Schorr currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and is represented by 303 Gallery, NYC and Stuart Shave | Modern Art, London.

About Andy Spade

Andy Spade co-founded Kate Spade with his wife, Kate, in 1993. Prior to pursuing his entrepreneurial ambitions, he spent eleven years in the advertising industry. Andy's experience with some of the world's most recognized brands has helped shape his vision for Kate Spade's future. As CEO/Executive Creative Director, Spade has focused on positioning the company in both the domestic and global marketplaces, developing product lines and managing the brand's direction. Specifically, the ad campaigns have been fundamental to expressing the world of Kate Spade. The fall 2002 campaign, Visiting Tennessee, had the distinction of being included in the Museum of Modern Art's Fashioning Fiction exhibition. In 1999, Andy launched Jack Spade, a collection of accessories for men. In 2001, the Jack Spade line was nominated for the Perry Ellis Award for new accessories talent. Andy lectures at schools such as Harvard, Columbia, Yale, The Rhode Island School of Design, and The Art Center College of Design.

Blind Spot is the international source book of photography-based fine art for artists, collectors, creative directors, designers, curators and art lovers. Blind Spot publishes new works by the renowned artists and discovers vital new work by up-and-coming artists. Fourteen years old, Blind Spot has gained an international reputation for being a visual magazine that does not talk about imagery?the content is imagery.

Collapsing Images Forum

As a counter-point to the visual conversation provided by the magazine, the Collapsing Images Forum aims to give a voice to the issues surrounding photography, and discuss the role of photography in the media and popular culture. Collapsing Images presents three vital discussions led by leading photographers, filmmakers and critics.

Part I A Conversation between Jack Pierson & Jerry Schatzberg (2:00 pm)

Part II Money, Money, Money, Money (4:30 pm)

Part III Truth and Authenticity in Photography (7:30 pm)

This event is co-sponsored by Blind Spot in association with Fred & Associates.

Part I A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JACK PIERSON & JERRY SCHATZBERG

About Jerry Schatzberg

A creator of poetic images and a compelling storyteller, Jerry Schatzberg has, over the past three decades, excelled in both the realms of photography and filmmaking. Published in Vogue, McCall?s, Esquire, Glamour, and Life in the 1960?s. Schatzberg captured intimate portraits of the generation?s most notable artists, celebrities and thinkers (from Bob Dylan to Robert Rauschenberg), and he pushed on in the 1970s to the medium of film and participated in the renaissance of American cinema, directing films such as: Puzzle of a Downfall Child, The Panic in Needle Park, and Scarecrow. His work marks a time in the history of film when the importance of solid and introspective narrative proved paramount. There are currently two books in production chronicling Jerry Schatzberg?s life and work.

About Jack Pierson

Jack Pierson makes photographs, word sculptures, installations, drawings, and artist's books that explore the emotional undercurrent of everyday life, from the intimacy of romantic attachment to the distant idolizing of others. Using friends as models, Pierson has consistently engaged star culture through his work, whether the stars are from the screen, stage, or art world. Refusing cynicism or irony, Pierson relates to his viewers by seeming to admit his own attraction to the fantasy life depicted in his artworks. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Cheim & Read, NY; Alison Jacques Gallery, London; and Regen Projects, LA. Pierson?s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Most people regardless of how they categorize themselves politically are weary of the legal and political conflicts that prevent individuals and communities from realizing the benefits of environmental conservation. In his new book, A Contract with the Earth, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and conservationist Terry L. Maple focus the environmental debate on the principle of common commitment. They declare a need for bipartisan environmentalism a new era of environmental stewardship. While acknowledging that liberals and conservatives do not see eye to eye on many issues, they argue that environmental stewardship is a mainstream value that transcends partisan politics.

Their approaches to our environmental challenges are based on three main premises: environmental leadership is integral to America's role in the world, technologically savvy environmental entrepreneurs can and should be the cornerstone of environmental solutions, and cooperation and incentives must be dramatically increased to achieve workable and broadly supported environmental solutions. The foundation of the book a ten-point Contract with the Earth promotes ingenuity over rhetoric as the way forward.

About Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1994 to 1998 and is well-known as the chief architect of the Republican Contract with America. Gingrich has published eleven books. His non-fiction books include: Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America, Lessons Learned the Hard Way, and Saving Lives & Saving Money. He is also the co-author of five fiction books including Never Call Retreat: Lee & Grant, the Final Victory, and his latest book, Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8. Since his days as an environmental studies professor, he has been involved in a variety of environmental initiatives. His new book, A Contract with the Earth, is co-authored by Terry L. Maple.

About Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including The End of Poverty.

Fear of terrorism was the chief political asset of the Bush administration during its heyday. Now that the Democratic party and environmentalism are in the ascendant, is a right wing politics of fear being succeeded by a left-liberal politics of fear? Can progressive politics appeal to our hopes and desires rather than our nightmares? Or are the threats we face?including global warming and energy scarcity so ominous that a politics of fear is the only credible kind left?

One of the founders of n+1 magazine, Benjamin Kunkel, will moderate as the founder contributors to the sixth issue of n+1 magazine, Meghan Falvey, Alex Gourevitch, Mark Greif, and Chad Harbach, weigh in.

About Meghan Falvey

Meghan Falvey is a graduate student in sociology at New York University. She is working on a book about the contemporary culture of work and love.

About Alex Gourevitch

Alex Gourevitch is a doctoral candidate in political science at Columbia University. He is co-editor of Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations.

About Mark Greif

Mark Greif is co-editor of n+1 magazine.

About Chad Harbach

Chad Harbach is managing editor of n+1 magazine. He is at work on a novel, as well as a series of essays about ecology.

About Benjamin Kunkel

Benjamin Kunkel is one of the founders of n+1 magazine. He is the author of the novel Indecision which received awards for the best first novel of 2006 in both France and Italy. His literary criticism has appeared in Dissent, Harper's, The London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. He is at work on a play.

Celebrating the publication of The Principles of Uncertainty, is an irresistible invitation to experience life through the psyche of Maira Kalman. Her book, a compilation of her illustrated New York Times columns, is part personal narrative, part documentary, part travelogue, and part chapbook where she paints her inimitable combination of image and text. Her whimsical paintings, ideas, and images?which initially appear random?ultimately form an intricately interconnected worldview, an idiosyncratic inner monologue. Kalman contends with some existential questions?What is identity? What is happiness? Why do we fight wars? And then, of course, death, love, and candy (not necessarily in that order).

The evening consists of gathering, ping pong, a conversation between Maira Kalman and Paul Holdengräber about life, love, yearnings, confusion with some visuals from the book Principles of Uncertainty. Julie Saul will be nearby. Small amount of questions. THEN the music. The questions from Principles of Uncertainty will be performed. Composition by Nico Muhly. Then all are invited for a refreshment involving Mocha Creme Cake.

Julie Saul owns the Julie Saul Gallery at 535 West 22nd Street where the paintings from Maira Kalman's book are now being exhibited.

A Note on the music: ?I wrote three sad songs filled with questions. Maybe later we will get some answers and then there will be more singing. But until then there are just these three songs and little interludes.? Nico Muhly

Caleb Burhans, countertenor & violin

Sam Amidon, banjo, voice

Brian Snow, cello

Nico Muhly, piano

About Maira Kalman

Maira Kalman is an illustrator, author, and designer. Most recently, she illustrated a new edition of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. She has created many covers for The New Yorker, including the famous map of Newyorkistan (created with Rick Meyerowitz). Ms. Kalman's twelve children's books include Max Makes a Million, Stay Up Late, Swami on Rye, and What Pete Ate. She also has designed fabric for Isaac Mizrahi, accessories for Kate Spade, sets for the Mark Morris Dance Company, and, with her late husband Tibor Kalman under the M&Co. label, clocks, umbrellas, and other accessories for the Museum of Modern Art. Ms. Kalman's work is shown at the Julie Saul Gallery in Manhattan.

In her own words: "born. bucolic childhood. culture-stuffed adolescence. played piano. stopped. danced. stopped. wrote. discarded writing. drew. reinstated writing. married Tibor Kalman and collaborated at iconoclastic yet successful design studio. wrote and painted children's books. worried. took up Ping-Pong. relaxed. wrote and painted for many magazines. cofounded the Rubber Band Society. amused. children: two. dog: one."

About Nico Muhly

Nico Muhly attended Columbia University and the Juilliard School, where he studied composition under Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano. Muhly's works have been premiered by the American Symphony Orchestra, the Juilliard Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra, the Boston Pops, Clare College Choir, and New York's Saint Thomas Church Choir, among others. In 2005, with designer/illustrator Maira Kalman, he created a song cycle on Strunk & White's The Elements of Style that premiered at LIVE from the NYPL. He did film scores for Choking Man (2006) and Joshua (2007), and he has worked extensively with Philip Glass for numerous film and stage projects. He has also lent his skills as performer, arranger and conductor to such musicians as Bj?rk and Antony of Antony and the Johnsons. Speaks Volumes (2007), a disc of Muhly's chamber music with electronics, brought invitations for concerts at both Carnegie's Zankel Hall and the Whitney Museum. He lives in New York City.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs?now known as "LIVE from the NYPL"?for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

After their translation of Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, comes this new translation of War and Peace. Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated The Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol, The Complete Short Novels of Chekhov, and The Brothers Karamazov along with many other works by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

About Richard Pevear

Richard Pevear has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Savinio, Pavel Florensky, and Henri Volohonsky, as well as two books of poetry. He has received fellowships or grants for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the French Ministry of Culture.

About Larissa Volokhonsky

Larissa Volokhonsky was born in Leningrad. She has translated works by the prominent Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff into Russian.

Together, Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated Dead Souls and The Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol, The Complete Short Novels of Chekhov, and The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, Demons, The Idiot, and The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky. They were twice awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and their translation of Dostoevsky's Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.

About Keith Gessen

Keith Gessen is a fiction writer, critic, and translator. His translation of Voices from Chernobyl won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2005. His translation of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's scary fairy tales will be published in early 2009. He has written about Russian literature and culture for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He is also one of the founding editors of the literary magazine n+1.

Why have images of black models been in sharp decline in high fashion for more than a decade?

Some of the fashion industry's most prominent voices Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan, super model Naomi Campbell, and Cathy Horyn of the New York Times to name a few have stated that models of color have been especially absent on the runway as well as editorially. This open forum with the fashion glitterati in the audience and on stage will investigate why and discuss what can be done to make positive change.

Former fashion model and model agency owner, Bethann Hardison will lead a discussion on the lack of the black image in fashion today with stylist Lori Goldstein, model agent David Ralph, fashion designer Tracy Reese, and casting agent James Scully. After revealing how they each personally fit into the fashion puzzle, the group will explore the issues and complex layers (who is really at fault? The designer? The agent? The photographer? The stylist? The magazine editor?) and consider solutions to the problem (consumer action, the fashion industry acknowledging its social responsibility, etc.). After a brief discussion, the audience will join an open forum of questions and comments.

About Bethann Hardison

Bethann Hardison began her international modeling career with Willi Smith, and went on to work with Anne Klein, Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, Perris Ellis, Issey Miyake, and Ungaro. Since her modeling days she has worked at Stephen Burrows, Valentino Couture, and Click Model Management before forming Bethann Management. In 1995, Bethann recreated the concept of the male supermodel and made fashion history by signing her client, Tyson Beckford, to an exclusive contract with designer Ralph Lauren. It was the first contract of its kind ever to be given to an African-American male model. In 1996 she ended her representation of fashion models and became co-executive producer of Between Brothers for Fox Network and more recently, co-executive producer of the syndicated television show Livin? Large. Bethann Hardison currently maintains management for Tyson Beckford, Kadeem Hardison, and Naomi Campbell and is developing a documentary on the Black fashion model.

About Lori Goldstein

For over twenty years Lori Goldstein has collaborated with Annie Leibovitz as principal photographer for Vanity Fair and, since the early 1990s, with Steven Meisel for Italian Vogue. Goldstein has held the position of Contributing Editor at Italian Vogue and Allure, acted as creative-consultant on wardrobe selection for Madonna, Cameron Diaz, and Demi Moore, and has been a creative consultant with fashion designers including Donatella Versace, Calvin Klein, Narciso Rodriguez, and TSE.

About Tracy Reese

In the nearly ten years since the debut of Tracy Reese, the label has come to epitomize feminine chic. Tracy has since ventured into home design, accessories and opened her first Flagship Boutique in Manhattan?s Meatpacking District in Spring 2006. Tracy Reese and her second label, plenty by Tracy Reese, are sold nationwide to Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Anthropologie, and Scoop, among others.

About James Scully

James Scully is a renowned fashion show casting agent responsible for discovering many of the iconic models who helped mold the image of Gucci during the stellar Tom Ford years. He worked with Tom Ford for ten years before moving on to work for Harper's Bazaar as a model editor. He is now a casting agent once again.

Stories About Loss

"We lose therefore we are."

Humans lose their keys, limbs, minds, pets, political campains, objects of desire, hair, body fat, competitive advantages, cell phones, loved ones, temper, sense of purpose, and, in the end, their lives.

Join The Moth, New York?s premier storytelling organization as it returns for a LIVE from the NYPL evening to explore both heartbreaking and hilarious instances of this fundamental human experience.

6:30 pm Doors Open

7:30 pm Stories Start on Stage

Co-presented by the MOTH

Hosted by: Paul Holdengräber

Curated by: Meg Bowles

Featuring stories by:

Melissa Bank

Bliss Broyard

Ophira Eisenberg

Jefferey Rudell

Josh Swiller

and others!

Cellist: Catherine Bent

Artistic Director: Catherine Burns

Senior Producer: Sarah Austin Jenness

Curator and Producer: Jenifer Hixson

Program Manager: Marianne Gadeberg

Executive and Creative Director: Lea Thau

About the Storytellers:

About Melissa Bank

Melissa Bank is the author of The Wonder Spot and the best selling first-time short fiction collection, The Girl?s Guides to Hunting and Fishing. She was the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and she has published stories in Zoetrope, The Chicago Tribune, The North American Review, Other Voices, and Ascent. Her work has been heard on "Selected Shorts" on National Public Radio and she is at work on a novel as well as a screenplay for The Girls' Guide. Bank holds an MFA from Cornell University, and lives in New York City.

About Bliss Broyard

Bliss Broyard is the author of the critically acclaimed family memoir One Drop My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race & Family Secrets, which was just released in September. Her fiction and essays have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and The Art of the Essay, and have appeared in Grand Street, Ploughshares, "O" Magazine, and Cookie. She is a frequent contributor to Elle Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. Bliss lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.

About Ophira Eisenberg

Ophira Eisenberg is a stand-up comic and has appeared on Comedy Central's Premium Blend and Fresh Faces of Comedy, VH-1's Best Week Ever and All Access, E! Channel's Top 100 Countdown and Discovery Channel's Lost Treasures of the Deep. Selected by Backstage as one of "10 Standout Stand-ups Worth Watching" in their Spotlight on Comedy issue, Ophira performs regularly at enowned comedy clubs across the country. She is the co-host and co-producer of the acclaimed weekly show Sweet Paprika (a Time Out New York Critic's Pick for comedy) at the D-Lounge in Union Square. Her writing is featured alongside that of Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Joan Rivers in the new Crown/Random House anthology I Killed: True Stories of the Road from America's Top Comics. She is also a regular comtributor for Us Weekly's Fashion Police.

About Jeffery Rudell

Jeffery Rudell is a graphic designer, writer and one of the founders of Hearsay; a storytelling workshop. He has won The Moth's Story Slam Championship (2003) and was recently featured on the National Storytelling Tour (2007). His work can be heard on The Moth CD's Audience Favorites Vol. I and Love Hurts. He lives in New York City with his partner Albert and dreams of finding a writing gig that will help pay his mortgage.
 

About Josh Swiller

Josh Swiller is the author of The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa. He was born with moderate hearing loss and was deaf by age four. A graduate of Yale University, Swiller has had a wide variety of careers; forest ranger, carpenter, slipper salesman, raw food chef, Zen noviate, journalist, and teacher among other things. In August 2005, he had successful surgery for a cochlear implant and partially recovered his hearing. He now speaks often on issues facing mainstreamed deaf individuals, and currently works at a hospice in Brooklyn, New York.
 

About Paul Holdengräber (Host)

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.
 

About Catherine Bent (Cellist)

Catherine Bent was born in England and has lived and worked and played in New York City for 15 years. As leader of the AXIS String Quartet, she has collaborated with jazz musicians Lee Konitz, Michael Hashim, and Rob Thomas among others. She has also put her talents to use in Cirque du Soleil?s Quidam, Dafnis Prieto's Absolute Quintet, Greg Osby?s Double Quartet, Palm Beach Opera, One World Symphony, John Cage's Ocean with Merce Cunningham, and Happy Hour Clowns? 9-minute Nutcracker at Dance Theater Workshop. Last week she appeared on SNL with Kanye West, in whose band she regularly plays. Currently, Catherine is pursuing a Masters in Jazz Performance at New England Conservatory.

About The MOTH

The Moth, a New York based non-profit arts organization dedicated to the art of storytelling, has been called New York's hottest and hippest literary ticket by The Wall Street Journal. The Moth features simple, old-fashioned storytelling on thoroughly modern themes by wildly divergent raconteurs. Past storytellers at The Moth have included Malcolm Gladwell, Ethan Hawke, Erica Jong, Frank McCourt, Moby, and George Plimpton as well as a VooDoo Priestess, an astronaut and hundreds more. In addition to its main stage, The Moth conducts six other programs including?The Moth StorySLAM, a competitive storytelling event, and The Moth Outreach Program, which conducts workshops for underserved teens and adults in rehabilitation programs and The Moth Story Tour which began in Los Angeles during 2006. The Moth has brought more than 2,000 live stories to over 60,000 audience members. www.themoth.org

How can aphorisms change your life?

Find out when James Geary brings his juggling aphorism show yes real live juggling of words and balls to LIVE from the NYPL. Geary  whose new book is Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists has been obsessed by aphorisms since he was eight years old. For almost 40 years, he's been collecting them, writing about them, and even translating them. The result is Geary's Guide, the most comprehensive encyclopedia of aphorisms ever written.

Geary will present a mix of memoir, literary history, audience participation?live juggling, with words and balls. Audience members are invited to randomly pick an aphorism from a globe and read it aloud; Geary then tells about that aphorism and the person who wrote it, weaving in personal and historical anecdote. Geary's authors range from Aristotle and Muhammad Ali to Mae West and the Zen masters, and some 350 aphorists in between, from the beginnings of the aphorism in ancient Egypt and China right up to the present day. There are also several blank strips of paper in the globe. If an audience member draws one of these, they can name any theme and Geary must cite a related aphorism on the spot. If he fails, they get a free copy of the book!

"Quote Repair"

Do your proverbs need pruning?

Upon entering, LIVE audience members are invited to contribute their favorite quotations for "A Drawing for a Drawing" by LIVE artist-in-residence Flash Rosenberg. Selected quotations will be drawn onstage as part of a performed drawing/talk warm-up offering tips for Quote Repair.

About James Geary

James Geary is the author of The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism which has been translated into Italian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Geary is editor-at-large with Ode and writes for Popular Science, Salon, and The Huffington Post. He is the former Europe editor for Time and author of The Body Electric: An Anatomy of the New Bionic Senses. His latest book is Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists. 

About Flash Rosenberg

Flash Rosenberg uses photos, drawings, writings, and performances to deliver pith, humor, and memories. Her public art mischief has aired daily on public radio and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, the Forward, The Funny Times and Lilith. She is a freelance photographer and currently Artist-in-Residence for LIVE from the NYPL. For the past four seasons, Flash Rosenberg has made a drawing of each LIVE conversation. A drawing of the evening along with drawings from past LIVE conversations will be on display.

Ken Burns' most recent documentary film project, The War, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of more than 40 men and women from four quintessentially American towns Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and Luverne, Minnesota who experienced and helped to win the most extraordinary war in history. Woven largely from their memories, the narrative unfolds as the war unfolded month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. The film series explores the most intimate human dimensions of a worldwide catastrophe that touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America demonstrating that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.

From Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps, the companion book to this fall 2007 PBS series, The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, includes all the iconic events as well as those of prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and those who struggled simply to keep families together while their men were shipped off.

About Ken Burns

Ken Burns has been making films for more than thirty years. In 1981, Burns produced and directed his first film for PBS, the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge. His other films include Huey Long; Thomas Hart Benton; Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio; a trilogy including The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz; Frank Lloyd Wright; Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; Mark Twain; and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. Burns is currently producing and directing a six-part film series on the history of the National Parks which will air on PBS in 2009. He is also working on a history of Prohibition and an update to his 1994 epic Baseball. His current film which premieres in September on PBS is The War with a companion book co-authored with Geoffrey C. Ward entitled The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945.

About Robert Stone

Robert Stone was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1937. He is the author of several critically acclaimed novels and collections, including National Book Award Winner Dog Soldiers and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Bear and His Daughter. His most recent book is Bay of Souls.

Three years ago, in a ground-breaking report for Harper's Magazine, Naomi Klein authored one of the definitive early statements of what precisely the Bush Administration hoped to accomplish in Iraq. The agenda, she wrote, was nothing less than the creation of "a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen." Klein showed how the "shock and awe" of the invasion soon gave way to a version of economic shock therapy so severe that it helped spawn the guerrilla insurgency that continues today. Since that time, Klein has continued to report from war and disaster zones, from the Asian tsunami to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Along the way, Klein realized that a new economic sector was coming into being?she calls it "disaster capitalism"?the hallmark of which is the seizure of public assets for private profit, combined with the privatization of the response to the disaster itself.

Tracing the intellectual origins of disaster capitalism back fifty years to the doctrines of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, exposes a cycle of mutually reinforcing "shock therapies," drawing new and surprising connections between economic policy, "shock and awe" warfare, and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that informs the torture manuals used today in Guant?namo Bay. Klein shows how the same techniques used to "soften up" and "break" prisoners are being used to reengineer entire societies. Her new essay, "Disaster Capitalism: The New Economy of Catastrophe," appears in the October issue of Harper's Magazine.

The Shock Doctrine is Naomi Klein's unofficial story of how the "free market" came to dominate the world, from Chile to Russia, China to Iraq, South Africa to Canada. Her new book explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically, and that unfettered capitalism goes hand in hand with democracy. Roger Hodge, a connoisseur of human wickedness, admires Klein's argument but wonders whether the logic of the new disaster economy, as compellingly frightening as it is, might not be an expression of something far older, and possibly more insidious, than capitalism.

This event is co-sponsored by:

About Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is a journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Klein writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian that is syndicated internationally by the New York Times Syndicate. A collection of her work, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in 2002. In 2004, she released The Take, a feature documentary about Argentina?s occupied factories, co-produced with director Avi Lewis. The film was an official selection of the Venice Biennale and won the Best Documentary Jury Prize at the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles. Klein?s forthcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, will soon be published worldwide. 

About Roger D. Hodge

Roger D. Hodge is the editor of Harper?s Magazine. He commissioned and edited Klein's 2004 essay, "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in Pursuit of a Neocon Utopia," as well as her October 2007 cover story for Harper's, "Disaster Capitalism: The New Economy of Catastrophe."

Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk?by turns witty, moving, and provocative?presents his criticism, autobiographical writing, and meditations alongside interviews and selections from his private notebooks in his new book, Other Colors. Written over the last three decades on his lifelong obsessions, on his own books and writing process, and on the work of others, he engages the work of such novelists as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Salman Rushdie and Patricia Highsmith. We learn not only how he writes but also how he lives as he recounts his successful struggle to quit smoking and describes his relationship with his daughter. Ordinary events?applying for a passport, the death of a relative?inspire extraordinary flights of association as Pamuk reflects on everything from the child?s state of being to romantic versus parental love to divergent attitudes toward art in the East and West.

About Orhan Pamuk

Born in Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2006. At the age of 23 Pamuk decided to become a novelist, and giving up everything else retreated into his flat and began to write. He has been writing for over 30 years and his works include Cevdet Bey and His Sons, The Silent House, The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, and the autobiographical book, Istanbul. From the mid-1990s Pamuk took a critical stance towards the Turkish state in articles about human rights and freedom of thought, although he took little interest in politics. Snow, which he describes as 'my first and last political novel,' was published in 2002. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Apart from three years in New York, Orhan Pamuk has spent all his life in the same streets and district of Istanbul, and he now lives in the building where he was raised. Other Colors: Essays and a Story is Pamuk?s first book since winning the Nobel Prize. In 2006 Orhan Pamuk became a Library Lion, the highest honor awarded by The New York Public Library.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs?now known as "LIVE from the NYPL"?for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

7:15pm Günter Grass interviewed by Andrew O'Hagan

8:00pm Norman Mailer interviewed by Andrew O'Hagan

8:45 - 9:15pm Günter Grass & Norman Mailer in conversation with Andrew O'Hagan

I always thought violence was one of the frontiers left to us as novelists. The great novelists of the nineteenth century dealt with love, they dealt with disappointment and love, they dealt with honesty, they dealt to some degree with corruption, they dealt with the forces of society as general abstract forces that could bend a person's will. Then came the twentieth century."

Norman Mailer, The Paris Review, Summer 2007

"Auschwitz was not a manifestation of common human bestiality; it was a repeatable consequence of a network of responsibilities so organised and so subdivided that the individual was conscious of no responsibility at all. The action of every individual who participated or did not participate in the crime was determined, knowingly or unknowingly, by a narrow conception of duty."

Günter Grass, What Shall We Tell Our Children?

Born in the 1920s, Günter Grass and Norman Mailer went on to become grand men of letters. They witnessed the 20th century at close quarters. At the center of each writer's consciousness is the role of their respective countries in World War II and the legacy of violence and guilt that created the Cold War. Yet as stylists these two novelists appeared to internalize the great forces of their times: the appeal of totalitarianism and the cult of celebrity, the struggle for national definition and the psychology of sex.

Mailer and Grass set out to create revolutions in the consciousness of their times, and now might be the moment to ask how the 20th century itself emerges from their work. What was that century? What would they write for its epitaph? Nobel Prize-Winner Günter Grass's memoir Peeling the Onion takes him back to his wartime childhood and adolescence it is a searing book that provides evidence on behalf of the self-accusing. Norman Mailer's latest novel, The Castle in the Forest, is his take on Hitler's own youth. These two great writers have come full circle, to the same place and time, and their creativity puts the 20th century itself on trial.

This event is co-sponsored by:

About Günter Grass
Günter Grass was born in 1927 in Danzig-Langfuhr of Polish-German parents. After military service and captivity by American forces 1945-46, he worked as a miner and stonecutter and studied art. His first poetry was published in 1956 and his major international breakthrough came in 1959 with his novel The Tin Drum, an allegorical account of German reality during the first half of this century, which, with Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, was to form what is called the Danzig Trilogy. In the 1960s Grass became active in politics, participating in election campaigns on behalf of the Social Democrat party and Willy Brandt. This was the start of his lifelong fight for peace and against all kinds of ideologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. His latest book, Peeling the Onion, has just been published in English.  

About Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1923. He published his first story at Harvard when he was 18. Mailer was drafted into the Army in World War II and served in the South Pacific. In 1948, he published a book that made him world-famous: The Naked and the Dead, based on his personal experiences during World War II. It was hailed by many as one of the best American novels to come out of the war years and named one of the "100 best novels in English language" by the Modern Library. He has since published over 30 books and has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has been President of American PEN and his his most recent novel is The Castle in the Forest.

About Andrew O'Hagan

Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1968. He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Review. He won the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. His new novel is Be Near Me.

In celebration of the 60th anniversary of Magnum Photos, Live from the NYPL and Magnum Festival '07 bring together a night of conversation with Philip Jones Griffiths, Keith Beauchamp, Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress, and Larry Towell. Fred Ritchin will moderate.

With the advent of technologies that promote the proliferation of media content, the sheer number of images available has thrown the nature of photojournalism, and even the power of photography itself, into a new light. In addition, the boundaries of what constitutes ?truth? and ?veracity? are constantly being blurred. In light of the increasing diffusion of the media, along with the rise of media conglomerates, it is pertinent to question the responsibility of today's media as well as to discern with whom that responsibility lies.

• Now that Internet blogs such as YouTube have emerged as a leading form of news transmission and a large population of the world owns digital cameras, how does this democracy change the role of the journalist?
• What role does the ?citizen journalist? play?
• Does this undermine traditional journalism or empower it?
• Does traditional journalism have a place in the future?
• Will digital journalism ever be accepted as a major documentary/art form?
• What happens to the idea of responsibility in the world of easy, quick and cheap photo-making?
• Do photographers still have a responsibility to their subjects? To their audience? And how are they held accountable?
• How will the Magnum ethos be affected by this brave new world of image making?

About MAGNUM

In 1947, four young photographers - Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger founded Magnum Photos two years after witnessing the atrocities committed against humanity during World War II. In forming a co-operative, these men were bound by a common goal of telling the world's stories with uncompromising responsibility to authorship. They sought to break free of editorial constraints and challenged the prevailing idea that a magazine or newspaper could own their images. Thus, the Magnum ethos, which still guides the agency and its photographers, sought editorial freedom and ownership of copyrights.

This event is co-presented by Magnum Festival '07

About Keith Beauchamp

Keith Beauchamp has devoted the past eleven years pursuing justice for Emmett Till. On May 10th, 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice re-opened the nearly half-century old murder case citing Beauchamp's documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till as both a major factor in their decision and the starting point for their investigation. Beauchamp has been featured on 60 Minutes, ABC World News Tonight Person of the Week, Court TV, MSNBC, CNN, BBC as well as the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and The Chicago Tribune. Beauchamp is producing a feature film with Frederick Zollo (Mississippi Burning) based on his eleven year journey in connection with the Emmett Till case.

About Philip Jones Griffiths

Philip Jones Griffiths became a member of Magnum in 1971. Born in Wales, Griffiths began photographing for the Manchester Guardian and the London-based Observer. He covered the Algerian War, Central Africa and Asia, photographing in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968. His book, Vietnam Inc., is one of the most detailed surveys of any conflict with commentaries which are both matter-of-fact and darkly ironic. In 1980, Griffiths assumed the presidency of Magnum, a post which he held for five years. Griffiths' photographs have appeared in most of the world's major magazines and his assignments have taken him to over 120 countries. He continues to work for Life and G?o on stories such as Buddhism in Cambodia, droughts in India, poverty in Texas, the re-greening of Vietnam, and the legacy of the first Gulf war in Kuwait.

About Susan Meiselas

Susan Meiselas became a member of Magnum in 1980. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, which were published widely throughout the world. Meiselas has had solo exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York and her work is included in major American and international collections. She has received awards including the Robert Capa Gold Medal for outstanding courage and reporting for her work in Nicaragua; the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America; and, in 2005, the Cornell Capa Infinity Award. In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
 

About Gilles Peress

Gilles Peress was born on December 29, 1946, in France. He studied at the Institut d?Etudes Politiques and at the Universite de Vincennes. Gilles Peress started using photography to create museum installations and books in 1971. His books include Haines (2004); A Village Destroyed (2002); The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar (1998); The Silence: Rwanda (1995); Farewell to Bosnia (1994); and Telex Iran (1984, 1997 reprint). His work has been exhibited and is collected by: The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography, PS1, all in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the George Eastman House; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Walker Art Center; the V & A; the Mus?e d?Art Moderne, Parc de la Villette and Centre Georges Pompidou; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, and the Nederlands Foto Instituut, among others. Among the awards and fellowships he has received are: Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts (1992,1984,1979), Pollack-Krasner (2002), and New York State Council of the Arts (2002) fellowships, the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography, the Gahan Fellowship at Harvard University, the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (2002, 1996, 1994), the Erich Solomon Prize, and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award (2000, 1999, 1998). Portfolios of his work have appeared on numerous occasions in The New York Times Magazine, The London Sunday Times Magazine, Du Magazine, Life, Stern, Geo, Paris Match, Parkett, Aperture, Doubletake, The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Peress joined Magnum Photos in 1972 and served three times as Vice President and two times as President of the cooperative. He and his wife, Alison Cornyn, live in Brooklyn with their three children.

About Fred Ritchin

Fred Ritchin wrote the history of Magnum Photos for its fortieth anniversary, published in In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers. Ritchin is Associate Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University, and director of PixelPress, an organization utilizing new media and documentary in collaboration with human rights organizations. Previously he was picture editor of The New York Times Magazine and executive editor of Camera Arts magazine. Ritchin was also founding director of the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Program at the International Center of Photography. His new book, After Photography, reflecting on the emergence of media in a digital environment, will be published in Spring 2008.
 

About Larry Towell

Larry Towell became a member of Magnum in 1993. A fascination with landlessness led him to the Mennonite migrant workers of Mexico, an eleven-year project completed in 2000. He has pursued similar, lengthy long-term reportage work in El Salvador, and Palestine. Towell's awards are numerous, and with the help of the inaugural Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, he finished a second highly acclaimed book on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2005, No Man's Land. Other books include The Mennonites, El Salvador, and In the Wake of Katrina. He has been published in major international magazines including The New York Times, Life, Stern, Geo, Elle, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Libération, and The Sunday Times.

A night in which Miranda July and her friends Becky Stark and David Byrne gather together to create a feeling of belonging. Miranda will read stories, Becky will sing songs, and David will ask Miranda questions. In moments the audience may also be asked to sing or read or ask questions of Miranda or of themselves. One thing is for certain, Miranda will not sing.

Both Miranda July's collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You and Becky Stark's album with her band Lavender Diamond, Imagine Our Love, have just been published and released. Both these works were enjoyed by David Byrne, who has released many albums and published many books, most recently, Arboretum.

About David Byrne

David Byrne co-founded the band Talking Heads. In addition Byrne has collaborated with Robert Wilson (The Knee Plays, The Forest), Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense), Bertolucci (The Last Emperor), 15 of the best Latin musicians in New York (Rei Mom), and most recently he performed Here Lies Love, a project about Imelda Marcos with musical contributions from Fatboy Slim, at Carnegie Hall. David Byrne has been publishing and exhibiting his photography and design work for the past decade. Like his film and musical projects, his artwork is often described as elevating the mundane or the banal to the level of art, creating icons out of everyday materials to find the sacred in the profane. Byrne has mixed exhibitions with public art: from billboards in Belfast and Toronto and subway posters in Stockholm to an audio installation in Stockholm that turned a building into a giant musical instrument. His books include Strange Ritual, Your Action World, The New Sins / Los Nuevos Pecados, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information (containing 5 PowerPoint presentations set to music), and his most recent Arboretum (McSweeney's).

About Miranda July

Miranda July is a filmmaker, performing artist and writer. She grew up in Berkeley, California where she began her career by writing plays and staging them at the local punk club. July?s videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in the 2002 and 2004 Whitney Biennials. Her short fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Harper?s, and The New Yorker, and her new book is No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories (Scribner). July created the participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore, with artist Harrell Fletcher and a companion book will be published in Fall 2007. July wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d?Or. July recently debuted a new performance, and is currently working on her second movie. She lives in Los Angeles.

About Becky Stark

Becky Stark's band, Lavender Diamond, just released their first album Imagine Our Love on Matador Records.?They are currently touring the United States. Becky has written and performed many songs, fables, mythologies and operettas.? She toured the US with the operetta "Birdsongs of the Bauharoque," a musical story she created with Xander Marro about the invention of peace on earth.?She has recently written and performed an operatic adaptation of The Little Match Girl.?Becky studied Russian Literature at Brown University and dance at the Merce Cunningham Conservatory. She is currently developing a musical comedy variety show.?She is also the creator of the "Peace Comics" along with cartoonist Ron Rege, Jr.?

WHAT IS A WEDDING FOR?

Rebecca Mead will be in conversation with Henry Alford to discuss Bridezillas, ministers-for-hire, heirloom manufacturers, Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings program, and the Oh, Mommy moment. For better or for worse, the way we marry is the way we are. So what does the American wedding with its softball games, its matching linens, and its $161 billion industrial infrastructure tell us about American life today?

About Rebecca Mead

Rebecca Mead is the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, a book that does for the matrimony industry what Jessica Mitford in the American Way of Death did for the funeral business, according to Holly Brubach in the New York Times. Mead was born in London, educated at Oxford and at N.Y.U. She has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1997, where she has interviewed everyone from goat herders in Mongolia to members of the fashion-obsessed social elite of Såo Paulo, and from Slavoj Žižek to Shaquille O'Neal.

About Henry Alford

Henry Alford is the author of a humor collection, Municipal Bondage: One Man's Anxiety-Producing Adventures on the Big City, and of an account of his misadventures in the acting trade, Big Kiss: One Actor's Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top, which won a Thurber Prize. He contributes to Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

Alma Guillermoprieto, the author most recently of Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, delivers three talks on contemporary Latin America.

Please note that each event is ticketed separately.

PART ONE: Revisiting the El Mozote Massacre: How the Dead are Forgotten, and Survive

Tuesday, May 8, 7:00 PM

South Court Auditorium

In her first talk, Guillermoprieto revisits the 1981 massacre in El Mozote, El Salvador, which was indirectly sponsored (and subsequently denied) by the Reagan Administration. Through the story of Rufina Amaya, the last survivor of the massacre, Guillermoprieto explores the troubling intersections of government, the media, human rights, and the fickle nature of United States public interest in Latin America.

PART TWO: Carnival and the Samba Overlords

Tuesday, May 15, 7:00 PM

Berger Forum

The general myth about carnival is that it provides an occasion for turning the social order upside-down. In her second talk, Guillermoprieto shows how the opposite is true in Rio de Janeiro, and particularly on the hill of Mangueira, headquarters for Brazil's most beloved samba school. There, as elsewhere in Brazil, the prevalence of violence and drug trafficking has left most Brazilians with a life that is constantly, frighteningly and irremediably upside-down, and they look every year to carnival to impose a fleeting, joyful, order on it.

PART THREE: How to be Mexican: An Instruction Manual in Music and Song

Tuesday, May 22, 7:00 PM

South Court Auditorium

Mexicans have been governed by a false dichotomy for decades in their relationship with the United States, one that asserts that it is not possible to be modern and Mexican at the same time. In her final talk, Guillermoprieto discusses the destructive nature of this prevailing national logic, and uses contemporary Mexican music to illuminate changing notions of Mexican identity and the rich border territories that can exist between traditional culture and the cult of modernity.

This event is co-presented with

About Alma Guillermoprieto

Alma Guillermoprieto is an award-winning journalist who has written about Latin America for more than twenty years. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, Guillermoprieto covered the insurrection against Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua for the Guardian and broke the story of the massacre at El Mozote for the Washington Post. She is the author of four books: Samba, an account of the year she spent with the impoverished carnival-makers of Brazil that was nominated for the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award; The Heart That Bleeds; and Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America. Her latest book is Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution. Her work has been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship, a George Polk Award, and a Nieman Fellowship (Harvard University), among other awards, and she is a co-founder of the Fundacion Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano/ New Journalism Foundation, in Colombia.

Taking on possibly the greatest issue of our time the malignant force of religion in the world?Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion through a close and learned reading of the major religious texts, citing numerous historical instances in which sexual repression and outrageous acts of violence have been committed in the name of God. He argues for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix. 

About Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School. He regularly writes for the Atlantic Monthly and Slate, and is the author of numerous books, including Letters to a Young Contrarian and Why Orwell Matters. He was a longtime contributor to The Nation, writing a biweekly column for the magazine from 1982 to 2002. He was named one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect. His new book is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

About Al Sharpton

Reverend Al Sharpton, is the President of the National Action Network (NAN), and one of America's most-renowned civil rights leaders. Whether it was his run for President of the United States in the Democratic Party primaries in 2004 or his use of passive resistance and non-violent civil disobedience, Reverend Sharpton has had an impact on national politics because of his strong commitment to equality and progressive politics.As the head of one of the most well-known civil rights organizations that currently has over thirty-eight chapters and affiliates across the United States, Reverend Al Sharpton has been applauded by both supporters and non-supporters for challenging the American political establishment to be inclusive to all people regardless of race, gender, class or beliefs. This summer across the country, Reverend Al Sharpton will launch his own nationally-syndicated news-talk program. Rush Limbaugh has said on his own radio program that Reverend Sharpton has the best shot of anyone at becoming the 'Limbaugh of the Left' by launching a major hard news driven radio show that attracts a strong following. Reverend Sharpton is the author of Al On America and Go and Tell Pharoah.

"Psychoanalysis does not need more abstruse or sentimental abstractions--any new paradigms or radical revisions--it just needs more good sentences." Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips is the author of:

On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, On Flirtation, Monogamy, Going Sane, and now Side Effects.

Stylish brilliance, playfulness, daringly suggestive titles and many good sentences are the mark of every book by Adam Phillips, one of the very best essayists at work today. Whether turning his attention to tickling, kissing, being bored, or monogamy ("there is a difference between not doing something because you believe it is wrong, and not doing something because you might be punished for it), reading Phillips is a dazzling, at times exhilarating experience. As the Observer of London wrote, "one thing you will never be is bored."

In his new book, Side Effects, Phillips claims that psychoanalysis as a form of therapy works by attending to the patient's side effects, that is, 'what falls out of his pockets once he starts speaking.'

Who knows what will fall out of Adam Phillips' pockets once he starts to talk. This conversation is one way of finding out.

About Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips is an essayist, psychoanalyst, and the author of eleven books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; On Flirtation; Darwin's Worms; Houdini's Box; and Equals. He writes regularly for the New York Times, The Observer, and The London Review of Books, and is General Editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations. His new book is Side Effects.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

Tinling Choong, Dany LaFerrière, Camelia Entekhabifard, and Edmund White have written books that play with taboo and off-limit aspects of sexuality, whether at home, on the streets, or behind a burka. Join these authors for a discussion with Wayne Koestenbaum about how contemporary literature continues to derive nourishment from eroticism at its most unconventional and forbidden.

About Tinling Choong

Born and raised in Malaysia, Tinling Choong graduated from Wellesley College and is working toward her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her first novel, FireWife, was published in 2007. She is currently at work on her next novel, Yuyu and the Banyan Tree.

About Dany LaFerrière

Born in Port-au-Prince, Dany LaFerrière worked as a journalist in Ha?ti before moving to Canada. He was a journalist in Canada, and hosted a television program for the TQS network. His first novel was Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired). The novel was later adapted into a screenplay by LaFerrière and Richard Sadler, and earned a Genie Award nomination for best adapted screenplay. His short stories have also been adapted into the recent film Heading South. LaFerrière divides his time between Montreal and Miami.

About Camelia Entekhabifard

A journalist and native of Tehran, Entekhabifard has been a contributor to O, the Oprah Magazine and has reported on Iranian and Afghan affairs for AP, Reuters, EurasiaNet, The Village Voice, and Mother Jones. In Iran, she wrote for a number of newspapers, including the leading reformist daily, Zan. In 1999, at the age of 26, she was arrested for her journalistic activities and spent three months in solitary confinement.

About Edmund White

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati and grew up in Chicago and Illinois. He is the author of nearly 20 books, including the recent autobiography My Lives. His novels include Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples. His cultural works include the anthology Gay Short Fiction, a travelogue States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, and a pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay Life. Edmund White currently teaches writing at Princeton University.

About Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum's publications include the nonfiction books Andy Warhol and Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars and Aesthetics; the novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and the poetry collections Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. Koestenbaum won a Whiting Writer's Award in 1994. He is a Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Visiting Professor in the Painting Department of the Yale School of Art.

A celebration of the life and work of Ryszard Kapuscinski, visionary journalist and world-besotted fabulist, and one of the great travelers of the 20th century (true heir to his hero and subject of his last book, Travels with Herodotus). Kapuscinski was a living link between Bruno Schulz and Gabriel García Márquez, with whom he was still team-teaching classes to young Latin American journalists only a few years back.

Salman Rushdie, Philip Gourevitch, Adam Michnik, Lawrence Weschler, Carolin Emcke, and Breyten Breytenbach join together to contemplate the lasting significance of this Polish master and longtime PEN supporter, who died earlier this year in Warsaw at the age of 74. There will be readings by Elzbieta Czyzewska and scenes from Gabrielle Pfeiffer's documentary, A Poet on the Frontline: The Reportage of Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Curated by Philip Gourevitch, Lawrence Weschler, and Paul Holdengräber

This event is co-sponsored by PEN American Center in association with PEN World Voices, The New York Festival of International Literature; The New York Institute for the Humanities; The Paris Review, and The Polish Cultural Institute.

About Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India. He has served as honorary Vice-President, Member Trustee-at-Large, and President of PEN American Center. His novels include Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. Rushdie has won the Booker Prize, the Booker of Bookers,? the Whitbread Prize, the Writer's Guild Award, the Aristeion Prize, and major literary awards in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, and Hungary. He was also a founder and first President of the International Parliament of Writers. He lives in New York City.

About Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch is the editor of The Paris Review and a long-time staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of A Cold Case and We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and in England, the Guardian First Book Award. Gourevitch traveled extensively for a decade, writing from Africa, Asia, and Europe, and in 2004, he was The New Yorker's Washington Correspondent, covering the presidential election. He lives in Brooklyn and is at work with the filmmaker Errol Morris on a new book about Abu Ghraib.

About Adam Michnik

Adam Michnik was born in Warsaw, Poland. He is one of Poland's leading journalists and former dissident, historian, writer, lecturer, and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, the first independent Polish daily newspaper. His books include Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives, The Church and the Left, and Letters from Prison and Other Essays.

About Lawrence Weschler

Lawrence Weschler was a staff writer at The New Yorker for over 20 years. His books include The Passion of Poland; A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers; Calamities of Exile; Vermeer in Bosnia; Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder; and most recently, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. He is serving concurrently as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Chicago Humanities Festival. He is a contributing editor with McSweeney's and the Virginia Quarterly Review.

About Carolin Emcke

Carolin Emcke is a journalist, political theorist, and writer. She has a doctorate in philosophy and has been a visiting lecturer in political theory at Yale. As a staff writer for the foreign news desk of Der Spiegel, she has written about war crimes and human rights violations in countries around the world, among them Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Colombia. Emcke's book Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter, was named Political Book of the Year in Germany in 2005. In 2006 she was awarded the Ernst-Blöch-Foerderpreis, a German award given to scholars and philosophers of extraordinary promise. Carolin Emcke lives in Berlin.

About Breyten Breytenbach

A native of South Africa, Breyten Breytenbach is a painter, activist, and writer of poetry, novels, short-story compilations, essays, and dramatic works. From 1975 to 1982, he was a political prisoner serving two terms of solitary confinement in South African prisons. His most renowned work is the four-volume memoir of this odyssey: A Season in Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Return to Paradise, and Dog Heart: A Memoir. Breytenbach's poetry collections include The Iron Cow Must Sweat and Footscript. His most recent poetry collection is Lady One. Breytenbach has been honored with many awards and has taught at the University of Natal, Princeton University, and the University of Cape Town.

About Elzbieta Czyzewska

Elzbieta Czyzewska first achieved acclaim as one of the foremost stars in the Polish sixties cinematic new wave, variously featured in such films as Andrzej Wajda's Everything for Sale and Wojciech Has's The Saragossa Manuscript. Following her emigration to America, she became a regular both on and off Broadway, starring in productions by directors ranging from Mac Wellman and Robert Wilson through Wajda and Martha Clarke. She also returned occasionally to Warsaw, starring, for example, in the Polish premiere of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation.

What place does travel writing have in an age of instant news and pictures? Are there truths that only language can convey? What is the relationship of a travel writer to his or her subject? Alain de Botton, Ma Jian, and IIija Trojanow will discuss using words to capture the feeling of a place for their readers at home and around the world. Paul Holdengräber will moderate.

About Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton was born in Switzerland and moved with his family to England when he was eight years old. De Botton has written about literature in How Proust Can Change Your Life, relationships in On Love, social hierarchy in Status Anxiety, and going abroad in The Art of Travel. In his most recent book, The Architecture of Happiness, de Botton asks what a beautiful building does, and discusses ways in which our environment affects our identity. De Botton regularly contributes to English newspapers such as The Independent and helps to run the production company Seneca Productions. He lives in London where he is Director of the Graduate Philosophy Program at London University.

About Ma Jian

Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China. He worked as a photographer for a petrochemical plant later moving to Beijing, where he joined the No Name Art Group and worked as a photojournalist for a state-run magazine. At 30, he was targeted in a government campaign against "spiritual pollution," which drove him to give up his job and travel for three years across China?a journey described in his book Red Dust, which won the 2002 Thomas Cook Award for Travel Writing. After the Chinese government banned his books in 1987, he moved to Hong Kong. Ten years later, he moved to London, where he now lives. He has written nine books, including novels, short-story collections, and essays, and has been published in 14 languages. His translated fiction includes The Noodle Maker and Stick Out Your Tongue.

About Ilija Trojanow

Ilija Trojanow was born in Bulgaria. In 1971, his family gained political asylum in Germany and a year later moved to Kenya. In 1989, he founded the Marino Publishing House, which specialized in African literature. His books include In Afrika: Mythos und Alltag Ostafrikas, and Guardians of the Soil: Meeting Zimbabwe Elders with Chenjerai Hove. In 1998, Trojanow moved to Bombay. He wrote reportages and essays for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among other newspapers. More recent books include Along the Ganges: To the Inner Shores of India and the novel Der Weltensammler. For this most recent book, he was awarded the 2006 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for fiction, the 2007 Berlin Literature Prize, and was short-listed for the 2006 German Book Prize. Ilija Trojanow lives in Cape Town.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

An evening with Julia Alvarez, whose latest book is Saving the World, a novel that probes the depths of politics, medicine, activism, and love featuring two extraordinary women — a 19th-century Spanish spinster and a best-selling Latina novelist transplanted to the United States.

About Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez is a poet, essayist and fiction writer. She spent her early childhood in the Dominican Republic, emigrating to this country at the age of ten. Her works include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which was selected as a Notable Book by the New York Times and the American Library Association, and In the Time of the Butterflies, a finalist for the 1995 National Book Critics? Award in fiction. She is also the author of two other novels, ¡YO! and In the Name of Salomé ; a collection of essays, Something to Declare; and five books of poetry: The Housekeeping Book, The Other Side/El Otro Lado, Homecoming: New and Collected, Seven Trees, and most recently, The Woman I Kept to Myself. She also writes books for young readers. Alvarez is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College and she and her husband have established a sustainable farming project and literacy center in the mountains of her native Dominican Republic. Her "green fable," A Cafecito Story, is based on her experiences on that farm.

BIBLIOMANIA is brought to vivid life at the Library in this pop-musical account of one of the world's pre-eminent rare-book dealers of the last century, Abe Rosenbach, and his brother Philip. Libretto and animated, projected illustrations by current Cullman Fellow and graphic novelist Ben Katchor, and music by composer and singer Mark Mulcahy.

This event is co-presented with

About Ben Katchor

Ben Katchor is a graphic novelist whose books include Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories; The Jew of New York; and The Beauty Supply District. His picture-stories and drawings appear in the Forward, Metropolis magazine, and The New Yorker, and his current weekly strip, "Shoehorn Technique," appears in the Forward and The Chicago Reader. He has created several music-theater productions, including The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island and The Rosenbach Company, both with composer Mark Mulcahy, and The Carbon-Copy Building, with Bang on a Can/Ridge Theater, which won an Obie for Best New Production in 1999. He has received fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations and was a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin. He is currently a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center of the New York Public Library.

About Mark Mulcahy

Mark Mulcahy is a composer and singer-songwriter who has recorded several albums with Loose Records, including In Pursuit of Your Happiness and Smile Sunset. He is co-creator, with Ben Katchor, of two musical theater pieces, The Rosenbach Company and The Slug-Bearers of Kayrol Island. Mulcahy previously fronted the New Haven-based band Miracle Legion, and later, Polaris; a house band for the early 1990s alternative television series The Adventures of Pete & Pete that gained renown for the songs "Hey Sandy" (featured in the opening credits of each show), "Waiting for October" and "Saturnine." As a solo artist, Mulcahy has opened for many notable performers including Oasis and Jeff Buckley, and received homage from Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, who dedicated a song to Mulcahy at a Boston show. Mulcahy's song "Hey, Self-Defeater" was featured in Nick Hornby's 31 Songs.

The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lectures* & LIVE from the NYPL present:

AROUND THE WORLD IN 50 YEARS

To celebrate the 80th birthday of Jan Morris, one of the greatest travel writers and essayist, Paul Holdengräber will conversationally ramble with the writer through some of the matters that have preoccupied her during a long life. For example:

• Patriotism
• The Practice of Travel
• Dislike of Concerts
• Norwegian Forest Cats
• The British Empire
• The Superiority of Small Countries (Notably Wales)
• Journalism at Mount Everest
• Marmalade vs Grape Jelly
• Venice vs Trieste
• Connoisseurship (ugh!)
• Intellectualism (yuk!)
• Death, Glories and Agonies of Family Life
• The Power of Kindness
• 57 Years of a Curious Friendship
• 53 Years of Visiting NY

And anything else that comes into their minds.

About Jan Morris

Jan Morris was born in 1926 to a Welsh father and an English mother, and lived and wrote in the persona of James Morris before completing a change of sexual role in 1972. She gave the world a famous account of this change of identity in her book, Conundrum. After four years in the British Army, and a degree course at Oxford, she spent five years as a foreign correspondent for the London Times, and five years more for the old Manchester Guardian, before leaving journalism for the writing of books. Morris scored a notable scoop in 1953 by accompanying the British expedition which was the first to scale Mount Everest.

She has published some 40 works of history, travel, autobiography and fiction, among them, Manhattan 45, Pleasures of a Tangled Life, Hong Kong, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, A Writer's House in Wales, The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country, Spain, Oxford, The World: Life & Travel 1950-2000, Pax Britannica Trilogy, The World of Venice, Last Letters from Hav, and Coast to Coast: A Journey Across 1950's America.

She accepted her Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1999 Queen's Birthday Honours, out of polite respect. She lives in Wales with her lifelong friend Elizabeth, in close touch with their four children and seven grandchildren. Jan Morris has taken a great interest in Welsh culture, becoming a member of the Eisteddfod bardic Orseed.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs - now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" - for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

*These annual lectures made possible by an endowed fund established by the friends and associates of the late Richard B. Salomon.

The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lectures* & LIVE from the NYPL present:

Elissa Schappell will take on Leslie Bennetts provocative assertion that women cannot afford to quit their day jobs to be stay-at-home moms. When women agonize about balancing work and family, many  solve  the problem by abandoning their careers. But as Leslie Bennetts demonstrates in her new book, The Feminine Mistake, it's dangerous to depend on anyone else to support you, and most full-time mothers will ultimately find their economic security challenged by divorce, a husband's unemployment, his illness or even death. And yet few think about such risks?or about the surprising benefits of work. Despite the stress of the juggling act, working mothers are actually happier and even healthier than full-time homemakers. The Feminine Mistake documents both the bad news and the good news with an inspiring new spin on a hot-button topic.

About Leslie Bennetts

Leslie Bennetts has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1988. Her 2005 cover story on Jennifer Aniston was the best-selling issue in the magazine's history, and the People magazine cover story about Bennetts interview with Aniston was the best-selling issue in the history of People. Prior to joining Vanity Fair, Bennetts spent fifteen years as a newspaper reporter. She began covering so-called  women's issues at The Philadelphia Bulletin in the early 1970's, and has continued to write about women, marriage, families and parenting ever since. After five years at The Bulletin, where she won many awards for writing and reporting, Bennetts spent ten years as a reporter at The New York Times, where she started as a writer for the Style page and went on to cover national politics, metropolitan news, City Hall, and cultural news. She was the first woman ever to cover a presidential campaign for The Times.

About Elissa Schappell

Elissa Schappell is the author of USE ME and co-editor with Jenny Offill of the anthologies, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She is a co-founder and editor-at-large of Tin House, and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

*These annual lectures made possible by an endowed fund established by the friends and associates of the late Richard B. Salomon.

The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lectures* & LIVE from the NYPL present:

"I am a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual."
Primo Levi 1919-1987

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Primo Levi's death, Joan Acocella, Alessandra Bastagli, Ruth Franklin, Ann Goldstein, and Adam Kirsch pay tribute to Levi's legacy as well as discuss his unpublished stories now translated in A Tranquil Star. The actress Maria Tucci reads from this collection. Robert Weil moderates.

A Tranquil Star, seventeen stories first published in Italian between 1949 and 1986 and now translated into English by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli, demonstrates Levi's extraordinary range, from the primal resistance of a captured partisan fighter to a middle-aged chemist experimenting with a new paint that wards off evil, to the lustful thoughts of an older man obsessed with a mysterious woman in a seaside villa. This collection once again affirms Primo Levi?s position as one of the twentieth century's most enduring writers.

About Primo Levi

Primo Levi was an Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, who first gained fame with his book, If This is a Man, an autobiographical story of survival in Nazi concentration camps. For the last forty years of his life, Levi devoted himself to attempting to deal with the fact that he was not killed in Auschwitz. "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died," he said. Among Levi's other works is The Periodic Table where he used the Russian chemist Mendeleyev's periodical table of elements as the basis of autobiographical meditations. If Not Now, When combined the emergence of Jewish consciousness and action taken to rescue victims of concentration camps. His last work was the essay collection The Drowned and the Saved where he writes that in the camp system useless violence dehumanized both guards and prisoners. "Before dying the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt," he stated. Levi also published poetry, science fiction, and short stories. He died in 1987, at the age of 67, in what some believe was suicide. Italo Calvino called Levi "one of the most important and gifted writers of our time."

About Joan Acocella

Joan Acocella is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Among her books are Mark Morris, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, and Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, a collection of her essays (including one on Primo Levi), was just published.

About Alessandra Bastagli

Alessandra Bastagli is the translator from the German of Jurek Becker's The Boxer and co-translator with Ann Goldstein of Primo Levi's A Tranquil Star. She works as a book editor in New York.

About Ruth Franklin

Ruth Franklin is a senior editor at The New Republic. Her writing also appears in The New Yorker, Slate, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. She is at work on a book about the literature of the Holocaust.

About Ann Goldstein

Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. She has translated works by, among others, Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alessandro Baricco, Elena Ferrante, and Roberto Calasso, and is currently editing the Complete Works of Primo Levi in English. She has been the recipient of several prizes, including the PEN Renato Poggioli prize, and an award from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

About Adam Kirsch

Adam Kirsch is the book critic of the New York Sun. He is the author of a book of poems, The Thousand Wells, and a critical study, "The Wounded Surgeon."

About Maria Tucci

Maria Tucci began her career in the original production of Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Later she won a Tony nomination for her portrayal of Rosa in the revival of The Rose Tatoo. She has worked extensively on and off Broadway, including Requiem For A Heavyweight (Tony Award Nomination), Athol Fugard's A Lesson From Aloes, and Mike. Her film credits include Sweet Nothing and To Die For, directed by Gus Van Sant.

About Robert Weil

Robert Weil is an Executive Editor at W. W. Norton & Company. He has commissioned from the Italian publisher, Giulio Einaudi Editore, both the The Complete Works of Primo Levi, as well as A Tranquil Star, which inaugurates Norton's involvement with the literary estate of Primo Levi. Weil has worked with many writers, including Anthony Appiah, Robert Crumb, Patricia Highsmith, Clive James, Paul McCartney, Jan Morris, Henry Roth, Oliver Stone, and Edward O. Wilson.

*These annual lectures made possible by an endowed fund established by the friends and associates of the late Richard B. Salomon.

The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lectures* & LIVE from the NYPL present:

Echoing Edward Said's belief that "Western humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism," the renowned critic Clive James presents his life's work in a new cultural canon that celebrates truth over hypocrisy, literature over totalitarianism. Containing over one hundred essays and nearly 40 years in the making, Cultural Amnesia illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. In discussing, among others, Louis Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, James writes:

"If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive."

Jacob Weisberg will introduce the evening. He is the editor of Slate, a free on-line daily magazine offering analysis and commentary about politics, news, and culture.

About Clive James

Born in Australia, Clive James has lived in London and Cambridge for over 40 years. During this time James established himself as one of the most influential metropolitan critics of his generation, as well as a television performer, writer and producer, author, poet and lyricist. His major series Fame in the Twentieth Century was broadcast in Britain, Australia, and the U.S. His collections of essays include Reliable Essays, Even as We Speak, and The Meaning of Recognition. Other works include the North Face of Soho, the fourth volume of his memoirs; novels Brilliant Creatures and The Silver Castle; a complete edition of poetry,The Book of My Enemy; and a collection of travel writings, Flying Visits. After helping to found the television production company Watchmaker, Clive James became chairman of the Internet enterprise Welcome Stranger. He now heads one of its subsidiaries, www.clivejames.com, the world?s first personal multi-media website of its type. His new book, Cultural Amnesia, is a study of cultural discontinuity in the twentieth century.

About Jacob Weisberg

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate. He was previously Slate's chief political correspondent and the originator of its "Strange Bedfellow" and "Ballot Box" columns. Before joining Slate in 1996, he wrote about politics for magazines including the New Republic, Newsweek, and New York Magazine, and has written as well for Vanity Fair and the New York Times Magazine. He is the co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World. He is also the author of In Defense of Government, the 2000 eBook The Road to Chadville, and the Bushisms series.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

*These annual lectures made possible by an endowed fund established by the friends and associates of the late Richard B. Salomon.

The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lectures* & LIVE from the NYPL present:

A dialogue between Pulitzer prize-winning fiction writer Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake) and filmmaker Mira Nair, whose motion picture adaptation of The Namesake opens in the U.S. the preceding day.

About Mira Nair

Film Director Mira Nair was born in Rourkela, India. From India Cabaret to The Laughing Club of India, Nair?s documentaries paved the way for her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! which was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA for Best Foreign Language film in 1988. Subsequent films include Mississippi Masala, The Perez Family, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, My Own Country, Hysterical Blindness, 9/11/ 01  September 11 (segment 'India'), Monsoon Wedding, and Vanity Fair. In 2003, Mira Nair founded an annual filmmakers laboratory, Maisha, dedicated to the support of visionary screenwriters and directors in East Africa and South Asia. She also served as the mentor in film for the prestigious Rolex Protégé Arts Initiative, helping to guide young artists in critical stages of their development. Nair's company, Mirabai Films, is currently producing a series of four films to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic in India. Her forthcoming films include The Namesake, an adaptation Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jhumpa Lahiri's debut novel, and Shantaram starring Johnny Depp.

About Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, England to Bengali parents, and raised in Rhode Island. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Lahiri has traveled extensively to India and has experienced the effects of colonialism there as well as experienced the issues of the diaspora as it exists. She feels strong ties to her parents' homeland as well as the United States and England. Growing up with ties to all three countries created in Lahiri a sense of homelessness and an inability to feel accepted. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was translated into twenty-nine languages. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel.

*These annual lectures made possible by an endowed fund established by the friends and associates of the late Richard B. Salomon.

The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lectures* & LIVE from the NYPL present:

Colm Tóibín and André Aciman discuss longing, heartbreak and language, the poetics of love and death. Which comes first, they ask, desire or heartbreak, love or loss, and which lasts longer, remembrance or remorse, questions that haunt them, and that they both have explored in their most recent work?Aciman's Call Me By Your Name and Toibin's Mothers and Sons: Stories.

About André Aciman

André Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt and False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory. He has also co-authored and edited The Proust Project and Letters of Transit. Born in Alexandria, he lived in Italy and France. He is currently the chair of The Graduate Center's doctoral program in Comparative Literature and the director of The Writers' Institute. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library.

About Colm Tóibín

Irish novelist and journalist Colm Tóibín is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1995 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novels include The Story of the Night, The Master, and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. His non-fiction includes The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe and The Irish Famine (with Diarmaid Ferriter). In 2002 he was a fellow at The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library to research the life of Irish dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory for his book Lady Gregory's Toothbrush. His latest book is a collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons: Stories.

*These annual lectures made possible by an endowed fund established by the friends and associates of the late Richard B. Salomon.

The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lectures* & LIVE from the NYPL present:

A conversation with Werner Herzog, one of the greatest living film directors of our times. His films include Aguirre, The Wrath of God, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, Even Dwarfs Started Small, and Grizzly Man. Filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn (My Architect) will introduce the evening.

About Werner Herzog

Born in Munich, director, screenwriter, producer, and actor Werner Herzog grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and never saw films, television, or telephones as a child. He started traveling on foot from the age of 14 and made his first phone call at the age of 17. During high school he worked the nightshift as a welder in a steel factory to produce films and made his first film in 1961 at the age of 19. Since then he has become one of the most influential filmmakers in New German Cinema producing, writing, and directing more than forty films, publishing more than a dozen books of prose, and directing as many operas. Herzog quickly gained notoriety not only for creating some of the most fantastic narratives in the history of the medium, but for pushing himself and his crew to unprecedented lengths, again and again, in order to achieve the effects he demanded. With the soon to be released of Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog returns to direct a feature film inspired by his own 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, which details the escape efforts of a German-American pilot who was taken as a prisoner-of-war after being shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War.

About Nathaniel Kahn

Nathaniel Kahn is a filmmaker. His feature length documentary, My Architect, about his father the architect Louis Kahn, played theatrically worldwide and was nominated for an Academy Award and an Independent Spirit Award. In 2004, Mr. Kahn was the recipient of the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary. His latest film, Two Hands, a short documentary about legendary pianist Leon Fleisher, is nominated for an Academy Award this year.

About Paul Holdengräber

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs - now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" - for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

*These annual lectures made possible by an endowed fund established by the friends and associates of the late Richard B. Salomon.

OPENING NIGHT

The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lectures* & LIVE from the NYPL present:

A Valentine's Evening with the Crumbs
(The George & Gracie of Comics)

Aline: We've been living and working together for thirty-five years. As I write this I'm astonished that we're so old and that we actually still love each other. Who woulda' thought, when we first met at a party at Robert's girlfriend's house, and he told me that I had "cute knees," that we were about to embark on a life-time adventure together?

Bob: Yeah, who'd a' thought?  She still has cute knees... and the only reason I'm doing this Valentine's Day appearance at the NYPL this year is because Aline asked me to do it with her and I said "okay, I'll do it as a Valentine's Day gift to you, since I've never given you a gift before in our whole life, except for that t-shirt I bought for you in the early 80's"... because, in fact, I hate doing public appearances... I'm becoming more and more of a hermit as I get older... but for Aline I'll do it... don't worry, it'll be a riot... we'll do our schtick... it'll be very entertaining as opposed to intellectual and tedious.

Aline: Actually, all he has to do is ask me a few questions and I can go on for hours...I love to tell "all". I'm compulsively honest... You?ll learn more about us than you would ever need to know. The hard job for Bob'll be to shut me up and get me off the stage... Finally, I get to tell my side o? the story!

Bob: That's right... it's all about promoting Aline's big, new book, Need More Love!! Check it out... February 14, NYPL!

Aline: PS: I've got so many cute outfits. How am I gonna decide what to wear?!

About Aline Kominsky Crumb

Aline Kominsky Crumb was born in Long Island, New York, studied painting, collaborated on, wrote and edited numerous comics, magazines and books starting with Wimmems Comix and Twisted Sisters. She was the first female creator of the graphic novel form, a genre which came to prominence in the eighties. Her influence on comic art is firmly established and her comic strip characters unforgettable. She now lives in a medieval chateau in the south of France with her family. She continues to work on her own and with her husband R. Crumb and can be seen frequently in the New Yorker. Her new graphic novel memoir is Need More Love (MQ Publications).

About R. Crumb

Robert Crumb was born in Philadelphia, and now hides out in the south of France with his wife and fellow artist, Aline Kominsky Crumb. He began his amazing career over forty years ago when as an underground cartoonist during the Summer of Love, he created ZAP COMIX and a horde of unforgettable characters: Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, The Snoid and Devil Girl to name but a few. Widely acknowledged as one of the most influential cartoonists of recent times, R. Crumb is the only underground cartoonist to be recognized by the fine art world. His work is exhibited in art museums in Europe and America to critical acclaim. His latest book is The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb (MQ Publications).

*These annual lectures made possible by an endowed fund established by the friends and associates of the late Richard B. Salomon.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture

Daniel Mendelsohn, a classicist and critic, weaves together observations about popular cultures both ancient and modern, particularly entertainments based on what he calls "spectacles of humiliation" tragedy in Athens, public games in Rome, talk shows and reality TV in America to arrive at provocative conclusions about the relationship between mass entertainment and politics in republics with imperial aspirations.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, an author, journalist, and critic, began his writing career soon after completing his doctorate in Classics at Princeton in 1994. His articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared in such publications as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Travel + Leisure, where is he a contributing editor. He won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism, the 2002 the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism and the 2005 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His books include his memoir The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity and a scholarly study, Gender and the City in Euripides? Political Plays. His latest book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, the story of his search to learn about the fates of family members who perished in the Holocaust, became a national bestseller soon after its publication in September. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College

About The Robert B. Silvers Lecture

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky in recognition of the work of Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, of which he was a founder in 1963. The series features contemporary people whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silver's interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

The High Middle Ages (1100 - 1347 A.D.) were extraordinary years for the advancement of science, women, and the arts. But most people today have exactly the opposite understanding of medieval life, envisioning instead rampant barbarism, superstition, and oppression both religious and secular interspersed with impressive castles and gallant knights as high points. This dark, albeit incorrect, view of the Middle Ages might seem like the ideal setting for an adventure film or bodice-ripper novel, but the truth of the time period is far more interesting.

Join historian Thomas Cahill and novelist/poet Margaret Atwood as they discuss Cahill's new book, Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. Cahill and Atwood will explore the European cities, people, and ideas that make the Middle Ages so fascinating and essential to who we are today:

The cult of the Virgin and how it encouraged powerful medieval female figures such as Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who were precursors to modern-day heroines like Eleanor Roosevelt and even Madonna.

The advent of courtly love and the invention of sex as romance.

The nature of reality. Could mud become gold, as the alchemists believed? What about the Eucharist? Did it at some point change from ordinary bread into a mystical reality?

Realism in art. Like scientists, artists began to explore reality as they pondered how to depict the human body, motion, and space.

About Thomas Cahill

Thomas Cahill is the author of "The Hinges of History," a prospective seven-volume series in which the author recounts formative moments in Western civilization. These books include How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Gifts of the Jews, and the latest volume, Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. Cahill endeavors to retell the story of the Western world through little-known stories of individuals who had pivotal impacts on history and contributed immensely to Western culture and the evolution of Western sensibility, thus revealing how we have become the people we are and why we think and feel the way we do today.

About Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid's Tale, her novels include Cat's Eye, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in italy; The Blind Assasin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; and her most recent, Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize. She lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

Once declared worthless and dehumanizing by the novelist and critic James Baldwin, Uncle Tom's Cabin has lacked literary credibility for over fifty years. Now, in a refutation of Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and his co-author, Hollis Robbins, demonstrate the literary transcendence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece.

As the annotators show, there has never been a single work of fiction that had a greater effect on the course of American history than Uncle Tom's Cabin. The 1852 epic reified the barbaric cruelties of slavery like no other previous work, transforming it for many Northerners from an abstraction into a hated reality and a blight on the nation. It was in no small part due to Stowe's writing that the debate over slavery became so fevered by the middle of the 1850s.

Despite its historic significance, the novel, which had once influenced writers like Balzac, Zola, and Dickens, gradually lost currency as a masterpiece. No longer seen as the powerful symbol of forbearance, the character Tom became conflated with pejorative symbols, and the book helped define America's attitudes towards race, gender, and even sexuality in the twentieth century.

Now, over fifty years after Baldwin's essay, in a ringing refutation of Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates Jr. demonstrates the literary transcendence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece and reinvigorates this classic American story, allowing the modern reader to re-experience Stowe's great American saga from a wholly unique perspective.

This event is co-presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem. 

photo of Thelma Golden by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 

About Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is most recognized for his extensive research of African American history and literature, and as W.E.B. Dubois Professor of the Humanities, for developing and expanding the African American Studies program at Harvard University. He has discovered and restored thousands of works by African American writers, most notably Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859), which is widely believed to be the first novel by a black American. He outlined his theory of signifyin' in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. He edited The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and co-edited The Civitas Anthonology of African American Slave Narratives and Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience.

About Margo Jefferson

Margo Jefferson was a staff critic for The New York Times from 1993 to 2006. She wrote about books, theater and eventually became a Critic-at-large. She has written and performed in two theater pieces. In 1995 she received a Pulitzer Prize, and her essays for Grand Street and The Nation have received awards from The Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and The American Library Association. Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published by Pantheon in 2006. She teaches at Columbia University and at Eugene Lang College, The New School University.

About Thelma Golden

Thelma Golden is Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem. She joined the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988 as a curator organizing many notable exhibitions, including Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art. At the Studio Museum, Ms. Golden has organized a number of groundbreaking exhibitions, including Chris Ofili: Afro Muses 1995-2005; Freestyle; Material and Matter; Glenn Ligon: Stranger; Martin Puryear: The Cane Project; and Isaac Julien: Vagabondia.

GEORGE PROCHNIK & WAYNE KOESTENBAUM: A Conversation

Family History & Its Discontents: Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, Stomach Pains, Death, New England & the Immortal Porcupine

How do our restless readings of our own family histories influence our take on cultural history, and vice-versa?

For all that Freud seems to have been chewed over ad nauseam by detractors and advocates alike, there remain bizarre, intriguing dark spaces where the light at the end of the cigar has failed to fall.

What caused Freud to pass out twice in Jung's presence and, on one occasion, waking in his arms, cry out, How sweet it must be to die?

Why does Freud's classic The Psychopathology of Everyday Life sound in many places like The Importance of Being Earnest?

Why hasn't more attention been paid to the tetherball tournament Freud took part in with a twelve-year-old girl at an Adirondack retreat near Lake Placid?

What, above all, led Freud to place on his desk amidst his ancient bibelots from the ruins of Hellenic and Semitic civilization a large metal porcupine with musical quills manufactured in America at the turn of the century and presented to him by the Boston Brahmin-covert-operative for the St. Louis Hegelians, Dr. James Jackson Putnam?

These questions will be pored over as discreetly as possible by Wayne Koestenbaum and George Prochnik.

This event is co-presented by The Atlantic.

********************************

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: A Talk

Are We Allowed Not To Enjoy?

In the last years, we are bombarded by the new wave of the triumphalist acclamations of how psychoanalysis is dead: with the new advances in brain sciences, it is finally put where it belonged all the time, to the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist search for hidden meanings, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers. As Todd Dufresne put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all its fundamentals?with the exception of Marx, some would add.

What if, however, this memorial service is a little bit too hasty, commemorating a patient who still has a long life ahead In contrast to the evident truths of the critics of Freud, my talk will argue that it is only today that the time of psychoanalysis has arrived and that Freud?s key insights gain their full value.

Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented him/her the access to normal sexual satisfaction: if you are not able to get it, go to the analyst, he will enable you to get rid of your inhibitions? Today, however, when we are bombarded from all sides by the different versions of the injunction Enjoy!, from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening, one should move to a more radical level: psychoanalysis is today the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy not not allowed to enjoy, i.e., prohibited to enjoy, but just relieved of the pressure to enjoy.

Slavoj Žižek

This talk is co-presented by the Austrian Cultural Forum NYC.

About George Prochnik

George Prochnik's new book is Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. His essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous journals. He taught English and American literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and has also worked as a therapist for the chronically mentally ill.

About Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum is a Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art. His books include Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, Andy Warhol, The Queen's Throat, and Double Talk. His next book, Hotel Theory, will be published in Spring 2007.

About Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek, dialectical-materialist philosopher and psychoanalyst, Co-Director of the International Center for Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. Among his latest publications are The Parallax View and How To Read Lacan.

New York artist and activist Paul Chan spent a month in Iraq with Kathy Kelly and the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated organization Voices in the Wilderness immediately prior to the start of the war. He speaks with her about their work, her recent visits to the Middle East, and the Poetics of nonviolence.

About Paul Chan

Paul Chan is an artist in New York. Working in a variety of mediums, from video to installation to drawing, Chan has achieved much acclaim for both his installations and his digital projections that blend a novel drawing and animating style with subtle philosophical reflections on politics, war, and life in the present tense. Chan's work has been exhibited worldwide for the past several years and was last seen in New York at The 2006 Whitney Biennial. Chan has worked with the aid group Voices in the Wilderness (with whom he spent an unsanctioned month in Iraq) and designed The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention (an agitprop map of New York City for use by protesters and delegates in 2004). Yet while such activities may not appear to directly inform his art practice, they tie into his general insistence on "hallucinating" different relationships in contemporary society: between the sacred and the secular, the high and the low, the poetic and the pornographic, drawing comparisons to such artists Chris Marker and William Kentridge.

About Kathy Kelly

Kathy Kelly is Co-Coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (VCNV). Kathy's work focuses upon ending the war in Iraq, in both its military and economic forms. Long active in peace team efforts, Kathy participated in the Gulf Peace Team (1991); Bosnia (1992-93); and Haiti (1994). In 1996, she co-founded Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign of civil disobedience to challenge U.S.-U.N. economic sanctions imposed against Iraq. Kathy traveled over 20 times to Iraq to build personal relationships and to challenge U.S. policies (over 70 VITW delegations traveled to Iraq from 1996 to 2003). In the summer of 2005, VITW was fined $20,000 for bringing medicine to Iraq without permission of the U.S. government (a fine which VITW refused to pay).

The Erotic & the Domestic: The Pitfalls of Modern Intimacy

"In Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic," Esther Perel explains that our cultural penchant for equality, fairness, and absolute candor is antithetical to erotic desire for both men and women. Sexual excitement doesn't always play by the rules of good citizenship.

"Laura Kipnis and I examine the pitfalls of modern intimacy, the emphasis on transparency and talking, the feminization of intimacy and how it often confuses closeness with surveillance. Where she is engaged in the polemics of adultery, I work with couples to negotiate the paradoxes of love and desire."

Esther Perel.

Walter Benn Michaels believes that if there is one thing Americans agree on, it's the value of diversity. Katha Pollitt agrees, but as she wrote in the November 6, 2006 issue of The Nation, that, though "I wanted to admire The Trouble with Diversity, Walter Benn Michael's much discussed polemic against identity politics and economic inequality...right away, I ran into trouble.... Michaels is agressively, almost proudly obtuse about racism and sexism, which he sees as distractions from class struggle." Though our corporation vie for slots in the Diversity top 50, and our universities brag about minority recruiting, and every month is Somebody's History Month, Walter Benn Michaels argues that our enthusiastic celebration of "difference" masks our neglect of America's vast and growing economic divide. Katha Pollitt will take on some of the issues raised by Walter Benn Michaels. For instance, affirmative action in schools, Michaels contends, has not made them more open, it's just guaranteed that the rich kids come in the appropriate colors.

Michaels takes on the many manifestations of our devotion to diversity, from companies apologizing for slavery, to a college president explaining why there aren't more women math professors, to the codes of conduct in the new "humane corporations." Looking at the books we read, the TV shows we watch, and the lawsuits we bring, Michaels shows that diversity has become everyone's sacred cow precisely because it offers a false vision of social justice, one that conveniently costs us nothing. The Trouble with Diversity urges us to start thinking about real justice, about equality instead of diversity.

This event is co-presented by The Atlantic.

About Walter Benn Michaels

Walter Benn Michaels is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Widely noted as one of the founders of the New Historicism, he is the author of Our America and The Shape of the Signifier and has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe and n + 1 among other publications.

About Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt's column, "Subject to Debate," appears every other week in The Nation and is frequently reprinted in newspapers across the country. Pollitt has also written essays for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Harper's, Mirabella, Ms., Glamour, Mother Jones, and The New York Times. She has appeared on NPR's Fresh Air and All Things Considered, Charlie Rose, The McLaughlin Group, CNN, Dateline NBC and the BBC.

About Scott Stossel

Scott Stossel, managing editor of The Atlantic, has been associated with the magazine since 1992 when, shortly after graduating from Harvard, he joined the staff and helped to launch The Atlantic Online. In 1996, he moved to The American Prospect where, over the course of seven years, he served as associate editor, executive editor, and culture editor. He rejoined the Atlantic staff in 2002 and oversaw the magazine's 2005 move to Washington from Boston. Along with writing and editing, Scott has taught courses in the American Studies Department at Trinity College.

Does the newest high-tech equipment glorify or destroy the freshest low-tech ingredients? Atlantic food writer Corby Kummer gathers a few leading chefs and thinkers, Mario Batali, Dan Barber, and Barbara Kafka, to map out battle plans for the newest culinary frontier.

This event is co-presented by The Atlantic.

About Mario Batali

Mario Batali creates magic in his many NYC hotspots, the flagship being Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca in Greenwich Village. Babbo was honored as ?The Best New Restaurant of 1998? by The James Beard Foundation, and Ruth Reichl at the New York Times hailed it with three stars. Mario's other restaurants are Lupa, Esca, Otto Enoteca Pizzeria, Casa Mono, Bar Jam?n, and Del Posto along with Italian Wine Merchants. Mario apprenticed with London?s legendary chef Marco Pierre White and spent three years of intense culinary training in the Northern Italian village of Borgo Capanne. Mario hosts two Food Network programs, "Molto Mario" and "Ciao America" and has authored Simple Italian Food, Mario Batali Holiday Food, The Babbo Cookbook, and Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes. Most recently, Mario created the first ever cookbook for NASCAR fans, Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style.

About Dan Barber

Dan Barber began farming and cooking for family and friends at Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. Since May 2000, Dan has seen Blue Hill grow from a noted neighborhood restaurant to most recently receiving a 3-star New York Times review. In 2002, Food and Wine Magazine featured Dan as one of the countrys Best New Chefs. He has addressed food system issues through op-eds in the New York Times. In 2004 Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture opened its doors. As the restaurants chef/owner and the center's creative director, Dan helped create the philosophical and practical framework for Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and continues to help guide it in its mission to create a consciousness about the effects of everyday food choices. Frank Bruni of the New York Times awarded Blue Hill at Stone Barns 3-stars. Both Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns have received Best New Restaurant nominations from the James Beard Foundation, and in the spring of 2006 Dan was awarded Best Chef: New York City. Dan serves on Harvards Center for Health and the Global Environment advisory board, and has been working with likeminded organizations to minimize the political and intellectual rhetoric around agricultural policies and to instead maximize the appreciation of eating good food.

About Barbara Kafka

Barbara Kafka is the author of award-winning books her readers swear by, among them Vegetable Love, Winner of the 2006 IACP award for Best Single Subject Cookbook, Roasting: A Simple Art, won the Julia Child Cookbook Award, and Microwave Gourmet. She was a regular contributor to The New York Times and has written extensively for food magazines in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, including a monthly column, "The Opinionated Palate" for Gourmet and others for Family Circle and Vogue. In the past, Ms. Kafka was active as a consultant to restaurants, industry and as a product designer. For many years she taught with James Beard as well as around the country on her own.

About Corby Kummer

Corby Kummer's work in The Atlantic has established him as one of the most widely read, authoritative, and creative food writers in the United States. Kummer's 1990 Atlantic book The Joy of Coffee, based on an Atlantic series, was heralded by The New York Times as "the most definitive and engagingly written book on the subject to date." Kummer was restaurant critic of New York Magazine in 1995-96 and since 1997 has served as restaurant critic for Boston Magazine. He was educated at Yale, and came to The Atlantic Monthly in 1981. He is the recipient of three James Beard Journalism Awards, including the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.

Changes in the national regulatory environment, in financial-reporting rules, and in the associated hazard of liability the so-called litigation time-bomb are said to be burdening America?s capital markets and placing them at a worsening disadvantage with respect to overseas competitors. Is this true? If it is, how widely will the effects be felt  Will this affect large and small companies alike? Above all, if America's competitiveness as the capital markets further decreases, what will that mean for the country?

A Town Hall discussion moderated by Atlantic Senior Editor Clive Crook.

Panelists:
William McDonough
John Coffee
Richard Cavanagh

This event is co-presented by The Atlantic and sponsored by Ernst & Young

About Clive Cook

Clive Crook is a Senior Editor of The Atlantic. In addition to his work for the magazine, he writes a column for National Journal and serves as chief editorial adviser to David Bradley, the chairman of Atlantic Media Group. He was formerly on the staff of The Economist, latterly from 1993 to 2005 as deputy editor. A graduate of Oxford and the London School of Economics, he has served as a consultant to the World Bank and worked as an official in the British Treasury. He lives in Washington, D.C.

PBS and The Atlantic will host a screening on the program ?Nature,? followed by a discussion moderated by Scott Stossel on how animal emotional intelligence mirrors that of humans.

Panelists:
Fred Kaufman
Lynn Sherr
Vicki Croke
Linda Koebner
Eugene Linden

This event is co-presented by The Atlantic and sponsored by PBS

About Fred Kaufman

Three-time Emmy Award-winner Fred Kaufman has been executive producer of Nature since 1991 and has worked on the series since its premiere in 1982. Many of Nature?s most memorable presentations have been produced under Kaufman?s stewardship, including the highly acclaimed miniseries Africa (2001) and Deep Jungle (2005). In 2006, The Queen of Trees won broadcasting?s highest honor, the Peabody Award, and, at the Banff World Television Festival, the NHK President?s Prize, which recognizes excellence in high definition programming. Other noteworthy programs have included In the Wild:Orangutans with Julia Roberts(1998) which won a prestigious Genesis Award for Outstanding PBS Documentary, and the Emmy Award-winning The Urban Elephant (2000). Kaufman has forged major international co-production partnerships with the BBC and National Geographic Television, among other organizations.

About Lynn Sherr

Award-winning journalist Lynn Sherr has been a correspondent for ABC?s 20/20 since 1986, covering a wide range of stories while specializing in investigative reports and subjects relating to women?s issues and social change. Her 1994 report on anorexia won broadcasting?s highest honor, the George Foster Peabody Award. Sherr is the author of Tall Blondes, a book about giraffes on which the ?Nature? episode is based. Her other books include America the Beautiful: The Stirring, True Story About Our Nation?s Favorite Song, and Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words. Sherr?s most recent publication is Outside the Box: A Memoir. She has written articles on wildlife and other subjects for many periodicals, including The New York Times. In 2000, Sherr traveled to India to report on midnight in Bombay for the ABC NEWS? award-winning Millennium Special. Starting in 1978, she served as a floor reporter for ABC NEWS at every Republican and Democratic nominating convention and received an Emmy Award in 1980 for her election coverage. Sherr also covered the NASA space shuttle program from its inception in 1981 through the Challenger explosion in 1986. Prior to joining ABC NEWS, Sherr was a reporter for WNET in New York and WETA in Washington, D.C., both public television stations, and a reporter for The Associated Press and Conde Nast Publications.

About Vicki Croke

For 20 years, writer Vicki Croke has been covering animal issues in print and broadcast media, traveling to East Africa, the Galapagos Islands, the Arctic Circle, Tasmania, and Madagascar. ?Animal Beat,? her column on wildlife and pet issues, ran for 14 years in The Boston Globe. As a contributor to NPR?s environment show Living on Earth, she has reported on topics ranging from gorilla conservation to a coyote vasectomy. Her book, The Lady and the Panda, the true story of the intrepid American who brought the first live giant panda out of China in 1936, is being adapted for film by Michael Cunningham for Focus Features. Croke?s other books include The Modern Ark: Zoos Past, Present and Future and Animal ER. Croke has written for numerous publications including Time, The Washington Post and Popular Science and continues to report on animal issues for NECN television in Boston.

About Linda Koebner

An advocate for animal welfare throughout her career, Linda Koebner has been captivated by chimpanzees since early childhood. In 1974, she became co-director of the first project to provide a new, more naturalistic home to nine chimpanzees who had spent years in biomedical research. Koebner worked with a consortium of organizations to pass the CHIMP Act (Chimpanzee Health Improvement Maintenance and Protection) in 2000. She served as Executive Director of Chimp Haven, a sanctuary for retired laboratory and entertainment chimpanzees, during its formative years. She has also worked with The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, The Humane Society of the United States, The National Anti-Vivisection Society, and various laboratories to realize her dream of a sanctuary for chimpanzees. In addition, she worked for the Children's Museum of Manhattan, the New York Zoological Society, authored several books, and created her own company, Wildlife Writers & Resources, to promote the appreciation of other species.

About Eugene Linden

Eugene Linden is an award-winning journalist and the author of eight books. He has written about animals and animal intelligence since the 1970s in books and articles, including cover stories in Time and National Geographic. His books on animal intelligence include, Apes, Men and Language, Silent Partners, The Parrot's Lament, and The Octopus and the Orangutan. In his other writing, Linden has focused on global environmental issues. His most recent book is Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations. Apart from his writing, Linden has consulted for the U.S. State Department and the U.N. Development Program. In 2001, Yale University named Linden a Poynter Fellow in recognition of his writing on the environment.

About Scott Stossel

Scott Stossel, managing editor of The Atlantic, has been associated with the magazine since 1992 when, shortly after graduating from Harvard, he joined the staff and helped to launch The Atlantic Online. In 1996, he moved to The American Prospect where, over the course of seven years, he served as associate editor, executive editor, and culture editor. He rejoined the Atlantic staff in 2002 and oversaw the magazine's 2005 move to Washington from Boston. Along with writing and editing, Scott has taught courses in the American Studies Department at Trinity College.

Is China'cs rise as the global superpower inevitable? What will be the socio-economic and political implications of China's emergence for the world in 2050? What will America and the world be like in China's economic shadow?

A Town Hall discussion moderated by James Bennet.

Panelists:
Robert Kaplan
Minxin Pei
Jonathan Spence
Arthur Waldron

This event is co-presented by The Atlantic and sponsored by British Airways

About James Bennet

James Bennet is The Atlantic's newly appointed editor, joining the publication in early 2006. Before joining the Atlantic staff, Bennet was the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times. During his three years in Israel, his coverage of the Middle East conflict was widely acclaimed for its balance and sensitivity. Bennet is a graduate of Yale University who began his journalism career at The Washington Monthly. Prior to his work in Jerusalem, he served as the Times' White House correspondent and was preparing to join its Beijing bureau when he was offered the Atlantic editorship.

About Robert D. Kaplan

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis. He is the best-selling author of eleven books on international affairs and travel, translated into many languages. His latest work is Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground. In the 1980s, Kaplan was the first American writer to warn in print about a future war in the Balkans. Besides The Atlantic, Kaplan's essays have appeared on the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He has been a consultant to the U. S. Army's Special Forces Regiment, the U. S. Air Force, and the U. S. Marines. Kaplan has delivered the Secretary of State's Open Forum Lecture at the U. S. State Department. He has reported from 100 countries.

About Minxin Pei

Minxin Pei is a senior associate and director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1991 and taught politics at Princeton University from 1992 to 1998. His main interest is U.S.-China relations, the development of democratic political systems, and Chinese politics. He is the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union and China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy. His research has been published in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Modern China, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy and many edited books. His op-eds have appeared in the Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and other major newspapers.