Library Talks

To celebrate the publication of When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and her co-author asha bandele stopped by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Akiba Solomon, Editorial Director of Colorlines, interviews the two about the history of Black Lives Matter, from hashtag to global movement.

What do Mark Zuckerburg and Martin Luther have in common? Historian and political commentator Niall Ferguson explains in his newest book The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. Ferguson stopped by The New York Public Library to speak with Gillian Tett, U.S. Managing Editor of the Financial Times, about the power and limitations of networks throughout history, our news feeds and censorship.

How did a former Harvard professor turned counterculture icon become an international fugitive? Authors Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis explain the larger-than-life story of Timothy Leary, the middle-aged acid enthusiast of the early 1970s, who famously preached "turn on, tune in, drop out." The PEN award-winning writers of Dallas 1963, talked with Aidan Flax-Clark about their research at NYPL and remarkable true story at the heart of their newest book, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon & the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD. We'd love to hear from you! Take our short podcast survey at www.nypl.org/podcastsurvey

The James Beard Award–winning food historian and cookbook writer was at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture this past fall to talk about her memoir, My Soul Looks Back, with chef and co-host of ABC's The Chew, Carla Hall.

The best-selling journalist speaks with Danish reporter on the Arctic, Martin Breum, about melting ice and global solutions for our changing climate.

The journalist and 2017 National Book Award Winner delivered the Library's annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture. The talk is named in honor of the co-founding editor of the New York Review of Books, who died in March 2017. With unexpected candor and intimacy, Gessen traced her own life as a sequence of choices and explored how notions of choice affect ideas about immigration, identity, and purpose.

Neil Gaiman's reading from 2013 uses a rare prompt copy that belonged to Charles Dickens himself and now resides in The New York Public Library. Dickens marked it up and annotated it for the express purpose of performing the story in front of an audience, which he did regularly in the 1850s and 1860s.

Is self-interest the only force motivating business? Or can altruism be an equally powerful driver? It's a question that Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize–winning father of microcredit, answers in his latest book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions. He spoke with fellow economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The titan of American poetry was at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in November to talk about her latest collection, A Good Cry. She spoke with Joy-Ann Reid, the host of MSNBC's AM Joy.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning literary historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright discuss Greenblatt's latest book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, "a life history of one of the most extraordinary stories ever told." Exploring the power of narrative to travel from myth into reality, Greenblatt and Kushner traced the tale from its biblical origins through its imaginings in the minds of writers and artists from St. Augustine to Albrecht Dürer to John Milton.