Ian McEwan in Conversation with David Remnick: What We Can Know
The Booker prize-winning author of Atonement and Saturday joins us for the launch of his audacious new novel — a genre-bending, time-traveling tour de force. For decades, Ian McEwan's novels have probed the depths of the human heart, creating unforgettable and utterly relatable characters of extraordinary moral complexity, caught in the crosscurrents of memory, history, and desire. His new novel, What We Can Know, begins at a dinner party in 2014 with the recitation of a love poem among friends and follows to 2119, in the wake of a catastrophic nuclear accident, as a lonely scholar and researcher chases the ghost of that poem. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem's discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about the world he thought he knew. It is at once a love story and a literary detective story, reclaiming the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, imagining a future world where all is not quite lost. In a special reading and conversation with The New Yorker's editor David Remnick, hear McEwan discuss the genesis of the new novel, his creation of a new kind of speculative literary fiction, why we will never stop longing for the literature of the past even as we reach inexorably toward the future, and much more. The conversation will air on The New Yorker Radio Hour.
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Summer of Our Discontent: Thomas Chatterton Williams with Jonathan Haidt
The Atlantic's Thomas Chatterton Williams joins #1 New York Times-bestselling social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) for a searching conversation about the evolution, paradoxes, and taboos of American social justice movements in the years since 2020 — and Williams' bracing new book, Summer of Our Discontent. In this sharp and unsettling work, Thomas Chatterton Williams — among the most incisive social critics of his generation — examines a culture transformed by the upheavals of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the rise of punitive social media. He traces how well-intentioned movements reshaped journalism, education, the arts, policing, and even the language we use to make sense of the world — often in ways that have unintentionally frayed the shared civic fabric that once held us together. In this reading and conversation, Williams and Haidt — two of today's most fearless and provocative thinkers — wrestle with the aftershocks of the summer of 2020, the threats to liberalism from both left and right, and what renewal might require. "Mass insanity broke out among America's elites in the summer of 2020, with devastating consequences for America's knowledge-creating institutions. Thomas Chatterton Williams is one of the few intellectuals who stood firm and made the case with great courage for liberal values and the free exchange of ideas." — Jonathan Haidt "Thomas Chatterton Williams uses a fiercely probing intelligence, instinctively dissatisfied with absolutist explanations, to explore without ideological blindfolds what happened in one momentous summer." — Adam Gopnik
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Trymaine Lee with Nikole Hannah-Jones: A Thousand Ways to Die
Join Pulitzer Prize winning writers Trymaine Lee and Nikole Hannah-Jones for a conversation about mortality, the weight of journalistic witness, and the enduring power of family in the face of violence — and Lee's new book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America. A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her father why, he had to confront what almost killed him — the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist and in his own family, to relentless racist violence. A Thousand Ways to Die confronts the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence; and his own life story— from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to exploring the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors' footsteps. In a deeply personal conversation, join Lee with fellow journalist and historian Nikole Hannah-Jones as they unpack and examine the burden of witnessing violence and oppression on both a personal and systemic scale — a powerful evening of conversation about the true stakes of survival.
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Universities in the Crosshairs: Larry Summers and Lee Bollinger with Robert Costa
In a moment when campus culture wars dominate headlines and government is putting enormous pressure on universities to change, two titans of American academia meet for a rare public conversation at 92NY. Lawrence H. Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University and former US Treasury Secretary, and Lee C. Bollinger, President Emeritus of Columbia University and one of the nation's leading First Amendment scholars, take on a question that cuts to the heart of American intellectual life: When the conservative media and federal authorities say that elite universities have been captured by a progressive ideology that is destroying higher education, are they right, or are universities still essential engines of free inquiry and democratic renewal in which a wide-range of perspectives and viewpoints can be expressed, explored and critically examined? The stakes could not be higher: Billions of dollars in federal funding; the future of some of America's oldest and most important institutions; and the character of our country's leadership for generations to come. Is American higher education at risk? Summers raises concerns that universities may have become too one-sided in their thinking and are risking public trust, while Bollinger believes such claims have been overstated and that universities continue to reflect a broad range of ideas. Moderated by Robert Costa of CBS News and CBS Sunday Morning, this event launches the new season of 92NY's Dialogue Project, a series dedicated to modeling civil, incisive public debate at a time when it is urgently needed. Don't miss this chance to witness two of the sharpest minds in higher education wrestle with a question that will shape the future of intellectual life in this country.
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The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox
Join the stars and producers of Hulu's new limited series, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox — Knox herself, who is an executive producer; star Grace Van Patten; creator and executive producer KJ Steinberg; and executive producers Monica Lewinsky and Warren Littlefield — for a special conversation.
The 92nd Street Y, New York has harnessed the power of arts and ideas to enrich, enlighten and change lives, and the power of community to repair the world for 150 years. This podcast features many of the fascinating people and conversations from our stage.
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