Princeton University Podcasts

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens discussed his stance on several hot-button issues, the personal rapport justices have with one another and what drew him to the legal profession in a well-attended public discussion at Princeton University with Provost Christopher Eisgruber, Monday, Oct. 10. At age 91, Stevens spoke fluently about the specifics of dozens of Supreme Court opinions, both recent and decades old, with Eisgruber, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values, who served as a law clerk for Stevens from August 1989 to July 1990. Stevens retired from the Supreme Court in 2010 after serving as a justice for 34 terms, having written 1,400 opinions, roughly half of them dissents. The event, titled "The Court, the Constitution and the Justice from Illinois: John Paul Stevens in Conversation with Provost Christopher Eisgruber," was held in a packed Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall. The Walter E. Edge Lecture and the John Marshall Harlan '20 Lecture in Constitutional Adjudication, it was presented by the Princeton University Public Lectures and the Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA).

A 40-year path of friendly arguments and groundbreaking studies of how governments weigh policies to deal with economic troubles has led a pair of prominent economists to share the 2011 Nobel Prize in their field. Princeton University professor Christopher Sims was honored along with Thomas Sargent, a New York University economist and visiting professor this semester at Princeton, for developing tools to analyze the economic causes and effects of monetary policy. Their work has revolutionized the field of macroeconomics and how it is applied by central banks and governments around the world. Sims, who is Princeton's Harold H. Helm '20 Professor of Economics and Banking, has been a faculty member at Princeton since 1999, and is the third tenured faculty member at Princeton to win the Nobel Prize in economics in the past decade. He and Sargent are longtime colleagues, and are currently teaching partners for a graduate course at Princeton. The day was highlighted by the insistence of both men to proceed with teaching their classes -- while also accepting the worldwide interest in their research -- and lighthearted banter over their career-long history of disagreements within the field. Both Sims and Sargent remarked on the prize with humility.

A panel discussion titled "A Midnight Modern Conversation" marked the opening of the Firestone Library exhibiton "Sin and the City: William Hogarth’s London"

The Council of the Humanities presents the Belknap Visitors in the Humanities: Creator and producer of the HBO series, The Wire, set in Baltimore, and Tremé, which takes place in New Orleans, Simon is also the author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. He will speak about The End of the American Century and What's in it for You?

On Sunday, September 11, Rachael DeLue, Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology, addressed the Class of 2015 for the annual freshman assembly on the topic of “History, Collective Memory, and the Power of Images.” Professor DeLue offered the following introduction to her lecture: “We commonly distinguish “history,” which entails the description of past events, from “memory,” defined as an individual’s recollection of those events. History, we assume, deals objectively with facts, while memory is personal and subjective, located in a murky middle ground between sensory perception and imagination. Yet memory plays a significant role in the telling of history and the formation of identity; how each of us remembers our past shapes how we see ourselves and how we perceive others today. Likewise, collective memory—the memory of events as shared by a large group, such as a culture or a nation—has a hand in determining how that group imagines itself and, importantly, the stories that group tells about its past, present, and future. The telling of history, thus, is often a matter of memory, a combination of fact and feeling, objective accounting and subjective storytelling. This lecture explores the entanglement of history and memory, beginning with a series of questions raised by the complex and controversial effort to memorialize the tragic events of September 11th. Through a consideration of the images and structures we create for the purposes of narrating collectively experienced and remembered events, from slavery in America to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we can learn a great deal about how we envision and make use of our past. We also gain insight into how our picturing of the past in works of art or in public memorials can in turn have a hand in determining who we are and what we do.”

The University marked the beginning of the academic year with Opening Exercises at 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 11, in the University Chapel. The annual interfaith service included an address by President Shirley M. Tilghman, and the recognition of academic achievements of undergraduate students. Freshmen entered the chapel with classmates in their residential college. The chapel was filled with the 1,300 members of the class of 2015, as well as faculty and administrators who processed in academic regalia.

Princeton University commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with a ceremony at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 11, on Cannon Green. Speakers included Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman, former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley '65 and Professor Anthony Appiah. The Chapel Choir and Glee Club also performed.

The President’s Lecture Series was established by President Shirley M. Tilghman in the fall of 2001 to give Princeton’s faculty an opportunity to learn about the work of their colleagues in other disciplines and to share their research with the University community. First proposed by Alan B. Krueger, the Lynn Bendheim Thoman, Class of 1976, and Robert Bendheim, Class of 1937, Professor in Economics and Public Policy, the lectures are presented three times a year and are open to the public.

Stanislas Dehaene is director of the INSERM-Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit and a professor at the College de France. He is a neuroscientist. The most recent edition of his book The Number Sense will be published in April. Steven Strogatz is a professor and director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. His most recent book, published in 2009, is The Calculus of Friendship. In this free-wheeling conversation between a cognitive scientist and a mathematician, Professors Dehaene and Strogatz will exchange ideas about how people learn math and gain intuition about it, whether the human mind creates math or discovers it, where math is born in the brain, and what the best ways may be to lead students (and their parents) to embrace math and understand it.

A Round Table discussion with Peter Hallward, Kim Ives, Ray Laforest, and Nick Nesbitt. Princeton University, March 3, 2011