Event Recordings
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Wednesday, September 12, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Members' Room | open to the public | $15 per person | registration requiredIn the first edition of this visionary book, Maggie Jackson sounded a prescient warning of a looming crisis: the fragmentation of attention that is eroding our abilities to problem-solve, innovate, and care for one another. Now she offers both a renewed wake-up call and a path forward as we reckon with one of the most pressing problems of our time.
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Wednesday, June 13, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredThe revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future.
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Thursday, May 31, 2018 - 6:00 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | Free of charge; advance registration requiredIn our occasional series, experts on a current-events topic bring their knowledge to an informal presentation and discussion with readers who want to get beyond the headlines. Join us for a special live recording of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research’s Podcast for Social Research, as three experts on Middle Eastern culture, history, and politics consider the relationship between religion and mass politics in the modern age.
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Thursday, May 17, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredThe story of how one woman's long love affair with New York's Central Park led her to organize its rescue from a state of serious decline, returning it to the beautiful place of recreational opportunity and spiritual sustenance that it is today.
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Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | free of charge | advance registration requiredClimate change is already happening. Authors Amitav Ghosh and Helen Phillips talk with photographer and filmmaker Nathan Kensinger about the role novelists and artists play in helping others to better imagine its effects.
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Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - 6:00 PM | Reception | For members and guests | Members' Room | reception at 6:00 PM, presentation at 6:30 PM | free of charge | advance registration requiredThe New York City Book Awards, founded in 1996, honor each year’s best books about the city. This annual ceremony honors the winning authors and publishers.
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Monday, April 23, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $20 per person | Advance registration requiredEach month, Theater of the Apes production company plucks a long-forgotten volume from the Library’s shelves and resurrects it as a low-budget variety show - visual art, skits, music, and surprises. This month: My Country by Marie of Romania (1916).
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Thursday, April 19, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | free of charge | advance registration requiredClimate change is already happening. Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy, speaks with visual artist Zaria Forman and conservation biologist Gleb Raygorodetsky about “transitional environments”—that is, regions of land undergoing change so dramatic they’re barely recognizable.
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Wednesday, April 11, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | free of charge | advance registration requiredClimate change is already happening. Author William T. Vollmann, playwright Chantal Bilodeau, and journalist David Wallace-Wells approach its dialogues through different mediums—book-length and magazine journalism, and through theatre. They’ll discuss their approach to gathering stories, their thoughts on why those stories matter, and the challenges they’ve faced when shaping issues of climate change into digestible narratives for the public.
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Thursday, March 22, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration requiredThe mysterious, highly influential hidden world of Yale’s secret societies is revealed in a definitive and scholarly history.
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Wednesday, March 14, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration requiredThe spectacular true story of a scrappy teenager from New York’s Lower East Side who stowed away on the Roaring Twenties’ most remarkable feat of science and daring: an expedition to Antarctica.
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Monday, February 26, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration requiredTwo leading scholars discuss their research into Willa Cather’s books and letters and the influence of New York City on her work.
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Thursday, February 22, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration requiredThree master biographers take center stage to excavate and celebrate their art and craft, inspired by James Atlas’ new memoir The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale.
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Wednesday, February 7, 2018 - 6:30 PM | The Writing Life | Open to the public | Members' Room | Free of charge | advance registration requiredJust admit it. You love love. Let’s talk about it. This panel covers it all, from the modern to the classic, starting with two debut novels: Leslie Cohen’s This Love Story Will Self-Destruct and Jill Santopolo’s The Light We Lost. The authors converse with Andrew Blauner of Blauner Books Literary Agency.Event Recording
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Wednesday, January 10, 2018 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the public | Members' Room | $15 per person | advance registration requiredFrom the author of the acclaimed history The Island at the Center of the World, an intimate new epic of the American Revolution that reinforces its meaning for today.
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Thursday, December 7, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredFind joy and insight with two authors in enthusiastic conversation about children’s literature, human nature, and their new books: Bruce Handy’s Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult and Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too).
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Thursday, November 16, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredYoga is hugely popular around the world today, yet until now little has been known of its roots. This book collects, for the first time, core teachings of yoga in their original form, translated and edited by two of the world’s foremost scholars of the subject. Sir James Mallinson is a lecturer in Sanskrit and Classical and Indian Studies at SOAS, University of London; Mark Singleton is a long-term research fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies. They are joined in conversation by Daniel Simpson.
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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Children | Open to the Public | For grades 6 and older | Members' Room | $10 per person, payable at the door | Advance registration requiredSpeed of Life is the heartbreaking, heartwarming story of a girl who thinks her life is over, when really it’s just beginning. The New York Times Book Review calls it “perceptive, funny, and moving.”
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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredAfter meeting for the first time on the front lines of World War I, two aspiring writers forge an intense twenty-year friendship and write some of America’s greatest novels. Rich in evocative detail from Paris cafés to the Austrian Alps, from the streets of Pamplona to the waters of Key West, The Ambulance Drivers is a biography of a turbulent literary friendship and an illustration of how war both inspires and destroys, unites and divides.
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Monday, October 30, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Special Event | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredTo lovers of theater, David Ives’ name says intelligence, humor, and excitement, from All in the Timing to Venus in Fur. In this one-time-only event, Mr. Ives will chat with Tony Award-winner John Rando, a frequent director of his plays, about his own work, the theater world, and the craft of playwriting.
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Wednesday, October 18, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredThe favored granddaughter of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson reveals a life of glamour, depressive battles, hard-won joy, and peace. It’s My Party is a portrait of another era, a guide to dealing with depression, and one woman’s deep effort to understand herself.
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Monday, October 16, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration required
In her long-awaited second volume, Mary Stewart Hammond chronicles a long marriage with sharp wit, dark irony, and poignancy. As James Merrill says of Hammond’s poems, they “brim with what the whole world knows.”
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Thursday, October 12, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredJames Fenimore Cooper has been credited with inventing genre fiction from the Western and the spy novel to the high seas adventure tale and the Revolutionary War romance. America’s first crusading novelist, Cooper reminds us that literature is not a cloistered art; rather, it ought to be intimately engaged with the world. Dr. Wayne Franklin offers readers the most comprehensive portrait to date of this underappreciated literary icon. This event is the first annual Henry S.F. Cooper Jr. Lecture on Early American History & Literature.
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Thursday, September 28, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredThis unique event brings together two cutting-edge historians on the era of women’s suffrage. Angela P. Dodson’s Remember the Ladies: Celebrating Those Who Fought for Freedom at the Ballot Box documents the fight for women’s right to vote, drawing on historic research, biographies of leaders, and primary sources from books to buttons. Brooke Kroeger’s The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote is the untold story of thousands of men who involved themselves with the suffrage campaign.
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Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - 6:30 PM | Lecture | Open to the Public | Members' Room | $15 per person | Advance registration requiredHis father conceived of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it was Washington Roebling who built what has become one of America’s most iconic structures—as much a part of New York as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. The literary editor of the London Times brings us an elegantly written biography with a compelling narrative sweep that will introduce Washington Roebling and his era to a new generation of readers.
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