NYIH Conversations

In 2010, Isabel Wilkerson spoke to the Institute about the fifteen years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Knopf, 2010). The book won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, In 1994, Wilkerson was the New York Times Chicago Bureau Chief when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago's South Side, and for two stories on the Midwestern floods of 1993. She was the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents argues that racial stratification in the United States is best understood as a caste system, akin to those in India and in Nazi Germany She has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Coover spoke at the Institute in the spring of 2006. Coover is the author of over a dozen postmodern novels, including The Public Burning and Pinochio in Venice. He was one of the early supporters of electronic fiction, which he defended in “The End of Books,” a 1992 New York Times essay. Coover established Brown University's MFA program in Digital Language Arts, and teaches courses on experimental narrative and literary hypermedia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this week's episode from the Institute's Vault, we hear a lecture on the revival of narrative in history by Laurence Stone. Professor Stone taught at Princeton from 1963 to 1990. He died in 1991. He is best known for his books The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642, and Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster crucial discussions around the public humanities. For more information and to support the NYIH, visit nyihumanities.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the episode of Conversations from the Institute, we hear from Eyal Press, who is the author of Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America (2006), Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times (2012), and Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, which won the Hillman Prize. In the fall of 2002 he spoke about his book with Eliza Griswold, author of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (2010), and Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Myself With Others, the podcast created by Adam Shatz and Richard Sears, contains conversations with writers, musicians, and critics. In this episode, the NYIH is pleased to run Adam's discussion with the comic book artist and journalist, Joe Sacco.

Institute fellow Ben Ratliff talks with Kelefa Sanneh about his new book, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, which tells the story of popular music during the past fifty years.

Myself With Others, the podcast created by Adam Shatz and Richard Sears, contains conversations with writers, musicians, and critics. In this episode, the NYIH is pleased to run the second half of Adam's discussion with the musician, writer and professor, George Lewis.

Myself With Others, the podcast created by Adam Shatz and Richard Sears, contains conversations with writers, musicians, and critics. In this episode, the NYIH is pleased to run Adam's discussion with the musician, writer and professor, George Lewis.

Myself With Others, the podcast created by Adam Shatz and Richard Sears, contains conversations with writers, musicians, and critics. In this episode, the NYIH is pleased to run Adam's discussion with the critic Margo Jefferson, an Institute fellow, and Pulitzer Prize winner.

During the Covid shutdown, musician Richard Sears and critic Adam Shatz collaborated on a podcast, Myself With Others. In this episode of the NYIH podcast, we talk to them about the podcast's origins and ambitions.

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, is Luke Menand’s fourth book. His last, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history. Menand is a professor of English at Harvard, and a staff writer forThe New Yorker magazine

Caitlin Zaloom is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her first book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology From Chicago to London, an ethnographic study of the international financial system, appeared in 2006. Her second book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, was published in 2019.

Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, and teaches in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. His memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Man in His Seventies, was published by Georgia University Press.

Novelist and Institute Fellow Ben Taylor talks about Here We Are, a memoir of his friendship with Phiip Roth. Taylor is the author of two previous memoirs--Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, and The Hue and Cry in Our House, which received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize.

In addition to three collections of poetry, NYIH fellow Honor Moore is the author of several celebrated works of nonfiction, including The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margaret Singer by Her Granddaughter and The Bishop's Daughter, a memoir of her father. Her newest book is Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter Mid-Century. Here, she talks about the book, women's lives and second-wave feminism, writing a hybrid of biography memoir, and the experience of publishing a book in the middle of a pandemic.

Biographer Benjamin Moser talks with Robert Boynton about the making of  his 2019 biography of Susan Sontag, which was awarded to Pulitizer Prize. Moser’s previous book, a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This episode pays tribute to longtime fellow Deirdre Bair, who passed away on April 18, 2020. The author of six biographies and two memoirs, Bair received the National Book Award for her 1978 biography of Samuel Beckett. At a January 2020 NYIH luncheon, she discussed her final book, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me, a Memoir, and looked back at her celebrated career.

Poet and NYIH Fellow Peter Filkins talks with Eric Banks about his exceptional involvement with the work of H.G. Adler, the Holocaust survivor who authored definitive fictional and ethnographic portraits of life in the camps. In 2019 Filkins published his biography of this extraordinary figure, a book that was preceded by his translation of the novelistic trilogy.

NYIH Fellow Josh-Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose last book, Island People, explored the Caribbean in all its complexities. On the occasion of Mardi Gras, he sat down with us to talk about New Orleans’s deep Caribbean roots.

NYIH Fellow Clifford Thompson joins us to discuss his latest book, written in the aftermath of the 2016 election, What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (Other Press).

Celebrated memoirist and critic (and NYIH fellow) Vivian Gornick discusses her newest book, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, and tells us what she learned when she revisited the works that nourished her at different points in her life.

André Aciman's 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name was the rare work of literary fiction that managed to develop an especially enthusiastic following, particularly in the wake of the recent film adaptation. With his recent novel Find Me, Aciman revisited the protagonists of his earlier work. A longtime fellow of the Institute, Aciman spoke to us about literary followups, music and literature, and the books that make readers weep.

Robert Boynton talks with Eliza Griswold, poet and author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2019.

New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, a New York Times Bestseller, winner of the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and one  of the 10 Best Books of 2019” according to both The New York Times and The Washington Post. In this episode, he talks with Melanie Rehak about Belfast of the past, the present, and the mind.

Lawrence "Ren" Weschler is the former director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and a two-time winner of the George Polk Award and won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. In this episode, Weschler describes the extraordinary and taxing story behind the writing of his most recent book, a biographical memoir of his late friend Oliver Sacks--a story that took almost three decades before culminating in the now published And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?

Jad Abumrad is the co-host and creator of Radiolab. He studied creative writing and music composition at Oberlin and, in 2011, was awarded a MacArthur Grant. In 2016 he launched More Perfect, a show about the US Supreme Court. In the fall of 2018, Abumrad produced The Most Perfect Album, a musical reimagining of the Constitution's 27 Amendments.

Institute fellow and University of Virginia media studies scholar Siva Vaidyanathan discusses his book, Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

Institute fellow Damion Searls discusses his new translation of German writer Uwe Johnson's 1700-page novel of New York, Jahrestage--published by New York Review Classics under the title Anniversaries.

What is virtuosity—and what does a music critic make of it? Worship it? Reject it? Ben Ratliff joins us to talk about the good and bad of virtuoso performance and how it has helped him think about the role of the critic in the age of Spotify.

Philip Dray reads "The Hunting of the Deer."

From Daniel Boone to "DIY" hipster hunting, The Fair Chase shows that hunting in America is a story as vast as the country itself, touching on everything from conservation to the history of guns to the emergence of modern sports. NYIH Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Philip Dray spoke to us about his new book, which chronicles the surprising and sometimes fraught ways that hunting has touched so many aspects of the American experience. 

In the nineteen-seventies, New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma lived in Japan, where he explored its film, literature, and theater. In this interview with Robert Boynton, Ian discusses his memoir, A Tokyo Romance, in which he reflects on these formative years.

The Trump White House is a place where a powder-keg masculinity is on dangerous display, ready to explode at any moment. Since his arrival in Washington, Rhonda Garelick’s cultural criticism has brilliantly argued that to understand the man and his administration, you have to pay attention to the women. At a time when the political dynamics around gender are especially volatile, Garelick, a professor at the University of Nebraska and an institute fellow since 2016, has become one of our most original observers, combining her celebrated scholarly work on the history of design, fashion, literature, and performance with a shrewd eye on the intersection of power, gender, and high-stakes theatricality.  

NYU philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah talks with Robert Boynton about his book The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. In it, Appiah explores how racial essentialism and our inadequate understanding of history distorts our conception of culture and identity.

Welcome to the New York Institute for the Humanities podcast. Learn more about the history of the Institute and our shows.