Dec 14, 2020
Never before has attention been such a precious resource. So on May 19, 2015, the New York Institute for the Humanities held a discussion titled, Distracted: Attention in the Digital Age. Moderated by Virginia Heffernan, the panelists were Winifred Gallagher, David Mikics, Mark Edmundson, and Matthew B....
Dec 7, 2020
In 1995, legal scholar Derrick Bell spoke to the Institute about Racial Libel as American Ritual. Professor Bell was one of the founders of critical race studies. He taught at Harvard Law School until 1990, when he left to protest the school's lack of female African American faculty. He taught at NYU Law School until...
Nov 14, 2020
In 2012, editor and literary agent Steve Wasserman spoke about his friend Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011.
Wasserman has been the editorial director of New Republic Books, Hill & Wang, Times Books and, most recently, Heyday, an independent publisher in Berkeley.
He was also the editor of the LA Times Sunday Book...
May 27, 2020
William Finnegan, a New Yorker staff writer, and Pulitzer prize winner, talks about his work-in-progress, Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, which was published in 1998.
May 5, 2020
Biographer Benjamin Moser talks about his 2019 biography of Susan Sontag, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Moser’s previous book, a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award