92NY Talks

Friends of the great Anthony Bourdain gather for a celebratory reading and conversation spanning the worlds of literature, food, and travel, in honor of Bourdain's restless creative spirit — and launching The Anthony Bourdain Reader: New, Classic, and Rediscovered Writing. Legendary chef, television host, and writer Anthony Bourdain was a trailblazer who changed the way we thought about food, culture, and ourselves. A larger-than-life thinker, maker, and traveler who was always greater than the sum of his parts, no aspect of his identity was more important to him than that of a writer. The Anthony Bourdain Reader is the definitive, career-spanning collection of that writing, assembled for the first time. In a celebration of his singular impact on American literature, food, and culture, join us for an intimate gathering of Bourdain's friends: chef and memoirist Gabrielle Hamilton; Patrick Radden Keefe, fellow traveler and chronicler of culture; legendary food editor and collaborator Ruth Reichl; Kimberly Witherspoon, his agent and the book's editor; and Laurie Woolever, his assistant, confidante, and biographer. From the kitchen to family life, from TV to travel through places like Vietnam, Buenos Aires, and Paris, from his teenage travel diaries to his unfinished novel, discover Anthony Bourdain behind the scenes, as you've never known him before, from the people who knew him best.

Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Robin Givhan joins Monica L. Miller, professor and co-curator of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the Costume Institute exhibition now on view at The Met, for a conversation about the crossroads of fashion, culture, identity, and art — and the life of the great designer Virgil Abloh, as told in Givhan's new biography, Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. The first Black designer to serve as artistic director of Louis Vuitton in the brand's 164-year history, Virgil Abloh's appointment as head of menswear in 2018 shocked the fashion industry. Blurring the lines between luxury and streetwear, Abloh embodied a new way forward for his industry — and in her spellbinding new biography, Givhan shows that Abloh's story is the story of a revolution in fashion and culture, a story that upends a century's worth of ideas about race, class, creativity, and taste. Hear Givhan tell that story — from his early career as an architect to his complex relationship with mentor Kanye West to his meteoric rise and tragic death at 41 of a rare form of cancer — honoring the legacy of a singular creative force whose influence is still rippling through American culture. "Robin's look into the life and work of the late, great, Virgil Abloh is thoughtful, intelligent, honest, and masterfully crafted. Virgil's freethinking and influence on the possibilities of what creativity can be was a tour de force." — Marc Jacobs

Go behind the scenes of two iconic roles — and the wild ride in between — as Michael J. Fox joins longtime collaborator and co-author Nelle Fortenberry to discuss their new book, Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space-Time Continuum. In the early months of 1985, Michael J. Fox did the impossible: starring in Family Ties by day, and filming Back to the Future by night. These two leading roles established him as a towering talent — Family Ties' Reagan-loving, tie-wearing teenager Alex P. Keaton defined a generation of TV viewers with his quick wit and conservative swagger, while Back to the Future's Marty McFly became a cinematic archetype: instantly recognizable, charismatic, and endlessly enduring in popular culture. The result was a time-bending stretch of work that would define Fox's career. Told with all of Michael J. Fox's warmth, wit and self-awareness, Future Boy is the untold story of that unprecedented time — and of the creative energy, ambition, and joy that fueled both projects. Don't miss this special conversation with Fox and Fortenberry as they revisit those extraordinary months and share insights and reflections on an unforgettable moment in entertainment history.

Legendary filmmaker and writer John Waters joins us for a reading and conversation spanning the arc of his remarkable career, in celebration of the new reissue of his classic early screenplays, with The New Yorker's Michael Schulman. From the shocking Pink Flamingos, which established him as a household name and set a new bar for cinematic filth, to Hairspray, the sweetly triumphant story of a dance-crazy teen in 1960s Baltimore — later adapted into a smash hit Tony Award-winning musical — John Waters' films redefined the art of trash in the '70s and '80s, and in the process blew open the doors of modern independent film. And as his early screenplays attest, Waters has long been more than filmmaker — he is a towering literary filth artist, a writer of radical and subversive wit; in other words, an intellectual in reverse. In this reading and conversation covering Waters' earliest days as a filmmaker in Baltimore to his status as the auteur king of exploitation films made for art theaters, we celebrate the entire arc of Waters' singular career, to honor the reissue of six of Waters' early screenplays — Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Flamingos Forever, and Hairspray.

Join former US attorneys Joyce Vance and Preet Bharara for a conversation and special live podcast taping of Stay Tuned with Preet, about history, the law, and what it will take to save our democracy — and Vance's first book, Giving Up Is Unforgivable. "We're in this together." For the past two years, Joyce Vance has signed off posts on her the chart-topping Substack Civil Discourse with these four words as she's guided readers through a continued erosion of democratic norms. Now, in Giving Up Is Unforgivable, she reaffirms that we're in this together with a clarion call to action — putting our current crisis in historical context and sketching out a vision for where we go next. Hopeful, even as she acknowledges the daunting challenges that lie ahead, Vance is the constitutional law professor you never knew you needed, explaining the legal context, political history, and the practical reasons that the rule of law still matters. In a conversation between two brilliant legal thinkers and major figures in US law, hear Vance's political manifesto for our moment — an empowering conversation about taking action in your community, rallying for a new era of civic engagement, and finding hope when we need it most. "The most frequent question I get, from frustrated citizens worried about our democracy, is this: What can I do? In Giving Up Is Unforgivable, Joyce answers that question with actual action items. She inspires as she informs and offers pragmatic advice even as she waxes poetic about all that America is and can be. This is a shining tutorial and a reminder that we the people still have the power." — Preet Bharara

Join #1 New York Times-bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell discuss his latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point; a fresh look at his breakthrough book, The Tipping Point. In 1996, Malcolm Gladwell published a piece in The New Yorker that became the seed of The Tipping Point. Twenty-five years after the book's publication, it remains a global phenomenon — blending social science, history, pop culture, and business to look at how a single event can spark a movement, a social phenomenon, or an epidemic. In Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell draws on fresh case studies to rethink and expand on his original ideas about how trends are born, catch on, and spread. Why in the late 1980s and early '90s did Los Angeles become the bank robbery capital of the world? What is the Magic Third and what does it have to do with racial equity? How did COVID and the opioid crisis become so devastating? Hear Gladwell discuss these questions and more — The New Yorker's crucial early support of Gladwell's writing, the enormous impact of The Tipping Point, what Gladwell has learned since its publication, and what social epidemics can teach us about the future.

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.

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

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.

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.