Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers with Michael Gross, author of New York Times bestsellers House of Outrageous Fortune, 740 Park, and Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, Rogues’ Gallery, and Unreal Estate.

This illustrated lecture brings to life the wild genius, ego, passion, and antics of the men (and a few women) behind the camera.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food with Catherine Price, an award-winning journalist.

This dialogue takes the audience on a lively journey through the past, present and future of the mysterious micronutrients known as human vitamins—an adventure that includes poison squads and political maneuvering, irradiated sheep grease, and smuggled rats.

Monday, November 7, 2016

The Gilded Age in New York, 1870-1910 with Esther Crain, a writer, who launched Ephemeral New York, a website that chronicles the city's past through photos, newspaper articles, art, and other artifacts.

This illustrated lecture tells the story of how New York transformed from a small-scale post-Civil War city lit by gas and powered by horses into a mighty metropolis of skyscrapers, subways, blazing electric light, and rapid social change.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan with Lynne B. Sagalyn, Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor Emerita of Real Estate, author of Times Square Roulette and scholar of major urban reconstruction projects.

This illustrated lecture offers the definitive account of one of the greatest reconstruction projects in modern world history.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

9/11 Memorial Visions: Innovative Concepts from the 2003 World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition with Lester J. Levine, a management consultant and poet.

This illustrated lecture tells the personal stories of more than 170 designers whose creative perspective translated an horrific event, giving deeper thought to the relation of memorial spaces to history, geography, technology and cultural diversity.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division with Michael A. Cohen, national political columnist for The Boston Globe.

This lecture captures the full drama of a watershed election, establishing 1968 as the hinge between the decline of political liberalism, the ascendancy of conservative populism, and the rise of anti-government attitudes that continue to dominate the nation's political discourse.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Subway Beats: Celebrating New York City Buskers with Kurt Boone, a native New Yorker, freelance writer, and poet.

This illustrated lecture showcases performers who collectively express the soul of the Big Apple while entertaining thousands of commuters and visitors daily.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Undisclosed Files of the Police: Cases From the Archives of the NYPD, From 1831 to the Present with Philip Messing, a veteran journalist, Bernard Whalen, a lieutenant in the NYPD, and Robert Mladinich, a retired NYPD detective.

This illustrated lecture provides an insider's look at more than 80 real-life crimes that shocked the nation, from arson to gangland murders, robberies, serial killers, bombings, and kidnappings.

Monday, November 21, 2016

GIRL: My Childhood and the Second World War with Alona Frankel, a renowned Israeli picture book writer and illustrator, the author of many classic children's books as well as recently published poetic memoirs for young adults.

This illustrated lecture features a discussion of Alona Frankel's first book for adults, her memoir about a Polish Jewish girl’s survival hiding as a Gentile in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Trotsky in New York 1917: A Radical on the Eve of Revolution with Kenneth D. Ackerman, a writer and attorney in Washington, D.C.

This illustrated lecture tells the story of Leon Trotsky’s sojourn in New York City on the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917. It presents a portrait not only of a towering yet all-too-human political figure on the cusp of history, but also of the city itself at a special moment in our collective memory.

Monday, November 28, 2016

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life with Ed Yong, an award-winning science writer on the staff of The Atlantic.

This illustrated lecture explores the world of microbes, allowing us to see how microbes do everything from defending us from disease to guiding our behavior and invites us to marvel at ourselves and other animals in a new light, less as individuals and more as thriving ecosystems.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again with Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings and the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management.

This illustrated lecture explores the difficulties of governing in our modern political landscape, and offers examples and recommendations of how the next American president can not only recreate faith in leadership, but also run a competent, successful administration.