On June 22, 2013, at Wadham College, Oxford, The New York Review of Books held a free conference, “Philosophy as a Humanist Discipline,” to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and to honor the lives, work, and legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams. 

This session, chaired by Robert Silvers, features remarks by Avishai Margalit, Alan Ryan, and Mary Warnock.

Berlin, Hampshire, Williams and Their World

On June 22, 2013, at Wadham College, Oxford, The New York Review of Books held a free conference, “Philosophy as a Humanist Discipline,” to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and to honor the lives, work, and legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams.

This session, chaired by John Vickers, features remarks by John Gray, Helena Kennedy, and Mark Lilla.

Hedgehogs and Foxes: The Philosopher as Public Intellectual

On June 22, 2013, at Wadham College, Oxford, The New York Review of Books held a free conference, “Philosophy as a Humanist Discipline,” to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and to honor the lives, work, and legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams.

This session, chaired by Hermione Lee, features remarks by Naomi Eilan, Alan Ryan, and Edward Skidelsky.

Plural Values and The History of Ethics

On June 22, 2013, at Wadham College, Oxford, The New York Review of Books held a free conference, “Philosophy as a Humanist Discipline,” to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and to honor the lives, work, and legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams.

This session, chaired by Ken Macdonald, features remarks by Jerome Bruner, Samuel Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron.

Is Political Philosophy More Than a Branch of Ethics?

On June 22, 2013, at Wadham College, Oxford, The New York Review of Books held a free conference, “Philosophy as a Humanist Discipline,” to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and to honor the lives, work, and legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams.

This session, chaired by Robert Silvers, features remarks by Avishai Margalit, Timothy Garton Ash, and Marc Stears.

Ethics and Power: The Long Shadow of Machiavelli

December 5, 2008: What does it mean when we speak in different ways to different people? Is it a sign of duplicity or the mark of a complex sensibility? Novelist and critic Zadie Smith takes a look at register and tone, from the academy to the streets, through black and white, with examples.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky. The series features writers and thinkers whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silvers’s interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

Zadie Smith: Speaking in Tongues (2008)

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky. The series features writers and thinkers whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silvers’s interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

Mary Beard: Do the Classics Have a Future? (2011)

November 30, 2007: New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof discusses genocide in Darfur based on his eight trips to the region, and the challenges of covering neglected stories from the developing world that the US and other nations have failed to address.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky. The series features writers and thinkers whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silvers’s interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

Nicholas Kristof: Darfur, the First Genocide of the 21st Century (2007)

September 21, 2009: Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks examines how the normal brain, if deprived of perceptual input, may generate illusory sensations as with the visual hallucinations of the blind, or the musical hallucinations of the deaf.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky. The series features writers and thinkers whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silvers’s interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

Oliver Sacks: Hallucinations (2009)

December 3, 2010: The Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott gives a new appreciation of Hemingway as a great and influential Caribbean writer, acknowledging Hemingway's influence on his writing and paying tribute to him with readings of his own poems.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky. The series features writers and thinkers whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silvers’s interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

Derek Walcott: Hemingway and the Caribbean (2010)

October 25, 2013: The novelist, short story writer, and critic Lorrie Moore examines some of the connections and disconnections from stage to page to theatre to screen to small screen.

The Robert B. Silvers Lecture is an annual series created by Max Palevsky. The series features writers and thinkers whose fields correspond to the broad range of Mr. Silvers’s interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

Lorrie Moore: Watching Television (2013)

Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, chairs a discussion with Robert Darnton, Carl H Pforzheimer Professor of History and University Librarian at Harvard, and Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton. (October 31, 2013)

The Internet, the Book, the University, and the Library

In this exclusive conversation, President Obama and author Marilynne Robinson discuss topics ranging from the problems of American democracy and the responsibilities of citizenship to the challenges of Christianity and their shared sense of the values and virtues of small-town America. The conversation was recorded on September 14, 2015 in Des Moines, Iowa. (Part 1 of 2)

President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa

In the second part of this exclusive conversation, President Obama and writer Marilynne Robinson discuss literature, politics, competition, American restlessness, teaching, and citizenship. (Part 2 of 2)

President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation—II

Chair: Sarah Hartmann, MENA Program, DGAP
Professor Aziz Al-Azmeh, Central European University, Budapest
Professor Bassma Kodmani, University of Paris, and The Arab Reform Initiative
Dr Malise Ruthven, The New York Review of Books

The Rise of ISIS and the Disintegration of the Syrian and Iraqi States

Chair: Sarah Hartmann, DGAP
Amro Ali, University of Sydney
Professor Bülent Aras, Sabancı University, Istanbul
Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed, The London School of Economics

Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia: Regional Powers Manqué?

Chair: Sascha Suhrke, ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius
Dr Emily Haber, State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Berlin
Flemming Rose, author and journalist, formerly Foreign Editor,  Jyllands-Posten, Copenhagen
Hugh Williamson, Director for Europe and Central Asia, Human Rights Watch, Berlin
Professor Unni Wikan, University of Oslo

Europe—Immigration, Asylum, and Human Rights

Chair: Professor Yaron Ezrahi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Professor Shlomo Avineri, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Qamar Mishirqi Assad, University of Haifa
Edward Mortimer, All Souls College, University of Oxford

The Israel-Palestine Conflict

Chair: Dr Luděk Sekyra, Sekyra Group, Prague
Hugh Eakin, Senior Editor, The New York Review of Books
Professor Dr Josef Joffe, Publisher/Editor, Die Zeit; Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford, California
Dr Sylke Tempel, Editor in Chief, Internationale Politik, DGAP

Outside Powers: From Imperialism to Impotence?

Chair: Simon Head, The New York Review of Books Foundation
Professor Dr Gudrun Krämer, Free University of Berlin
Professor Itamar Rabinovich, Dan David Foundation, Tel Aviv:  New York and Tel Aviv Universities
Professor Bassam Tibi, Cornell University

The Middle East: World Crisis?

With Edward P. Gallagher, President and CEO, The American-Scandinavian Foundation; Simon Head, Director of Programs, The New York Review of Books Foundation; Nancy Reynolds, The George Balanchine Foundation; Elizabeth Kendall, The New School; Lynn Garafola, Barnard College; and Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times.

Part of ‘Agon’ at Sixty: a symposium to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the first performance of the Stravinsky–Balanchine ballet Agon. Held June 26, 2017 at Scandinavia House in New York City.

Welcoming Remarks and Panel I: From Apollo to Agon

Part of ‘Agon’ at Sixty: a symposium to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the first performance of the Stravinsky–Balanchine ballet Agon. Held June 26, 2017 at Scandinavia House in New York City.

Performance by Maria Kowroski and Jared Angle

With Robert Gottlieb; Arthur Mitchell, Dance Theater of Harlem; Barbara Horgan, The Balanchine Trust; and Allegra Kent, Barnard College.

Part of ‘Agon’ at Sixty: a symposium to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the first performance of the Stravinsky–Balanchine ballet Agon. Held June 26, 2017 at Scandinavia House in New York City.

The Moment of Agon

Interview with Jacques d'Amboise

Claudia Dreifus talks with producer and journalist Ira Glass of This American Life for an interview published on the NYR Daily. Photograph of Glass by Phil Penman.

Claudia Dreifus Talks with Ira Glass

On September 23, 2019, The New York Review of Books and David Zwirner Books hosted the first event in POWER/CULTURE, a series of public talks bringing together leading writers, artists, and thinkers to explore the role of power within the cultural sphere.

This event, “The Power of the Critic,” addressed the evolving role of critics, publications, and media in making taste, careers, and canons. The panelists were Manohla Dargis (co-chief film critic for The New York Times), Antwaun Sargent (independent writer and critic), Jillian Steinhauer (art critic for The New York Times), and Daniel Mendelsohn (editor-at-large of The New York Review), moderated by Lucas Zwirner (head of content of David Zwirner).

POWER/CULTURE Part One: The Power of the Critic

“As I write, I’m listening on YouTube to a “virtual chorus” of Verdi’s Va Pensiero—Italy’s unofficial anthem of national unity. Its soaring music and lyrics are soothing in this bleak time of solitude and anxiety. On Day One of the lockdown here in Rome, the first thing I noticed was a totally new urban soundtrack. The nearby Lungotevere Farnesina that flanks the Tiber River, is normally a chaotic, screeching rumble of cars, buses and motorcycles. It’s now on mute.”

Pandemic Journal: Sylvia Poggioli, Rome, Italy, March 23, 2020

“Only literature can help us get a handle on the present pandemic—we have no personal experience to guide us. We vainly scan the pages of Camus, whose plague is metaphorical, and Defoe, in which it is an ingenious daily, hourly enemy. But this one is different, more like a transparent fog, leaving its traces everywhere and anywhere, to be accidentally picked up and passed on, until it finds its ideal destination in the elderly and ailing, whom it steadily, unerringly destroys. And short of sealing ourselves up in plastic bags and never setting foot outside our disinfected homes, we can do nothing about it.”

Pandemic Journal: Simon Callow, London, England, March 19, 2020

“I deal in words for a living, but I have had difficulty forming them, since that moment, whether to describe or analyze. I don’t really understand them anymore. I understand touch, breath, contact. I understand plane tickets—I booked one as the price rose under me, the morning after Trump’s address.”

Pandemic Journal: Anne Enright, Dublin, Ireland, March 22, 2020

“Quarantine suits my father. He wipes down all the doorknobs in the apartment with Lysol. Working from a Japanese template he found online, he has cut up one of his shirts and sits at the kitchen table sewing the scraps into masks. I spent some time last semester hanging around a biophysics lab where sterilization was reflexive, every pipette tip and glove used once and then chucked into a biohazard bin to be incinerated. MIT labs are now turning off their machines, freezing their cultures, and donating protective gear and testing equipment to Mass General.”

Pandemic Journal: Lucy Jakub, Northampton, Massachusetts, March 24, 2020

Pandemic Journal: Alma Guillermoprieto, Bogotá, Colombia, March 24, 2020

Pandemic Journal: Hari Kunzru, Brooklyn, New York, March 23, 2020

“I realized what I had been experiencing the whole day of my outing: a heightened appreciation of our ordinary lives, as if they were something extraordinary—something almost like a miracle. I knew that the feeling would disappear as the virus faded away, or, in the worst-case scenario, as we resigned ourselves to living with it. And I thought about the role of literature, how it can make us appreciate our ordinary lives as if they were a miracle—and do so even in a time of boring normalcy.”

Pandemic Journal: Minae Mizumura, Tokyo, Japan, March 23, 2020

“I came to Ethiopia for book research that has to do with displacement and Eden, and tracing our beginnings as humans. How could I have known that the trip I had meticulously planned for months would be so ill-timed, that the world would be so anxious about endings?”

Pandemic Journal: Anna Badkhen, Lalibela, Ethopia, March 21, 2020

“In early March, at a faculty meeting, the coronavirus was third on my list of agenda items, after facilities improvements and fundraising progress. I mentioned a colleague’s suggestion that Wesleyan, where I am president, should cancel the upcoming Spring Break so as to finish the semester early. The room erupted in laughter, and I joined in. Students have their theses, professors their research—ridiculous to contemplate disrupting everyone’s plans.”

Pandemic Journal: Michael S. Roth, Middletown, Connecticut, March 24, 2020

“Along the boardwalk there are people walking, jogging, walking their dogs, singly or in couples. They are sensibly spaced, intentionally or not. I keep my own distance: all of them are potential carriers. It feels new, this very old way of looking at the world and fearing the unseen, suspecting dybbuks and devils inside people, lurking on door handles, hovering in the air.”

Pandemic Journal: Adam Foulds, Toronto, Canada, March 27, 2020

On February 5, 2013, <i>The New York Review</i> celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an evening at Town Hall in New York City. In this recording from the event, Joan Didion reads from her 1991 essay "<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1991/jan/17/new-york-sentimental-journeys/">New York: Sentimental Journeys</a>" about the Central Park jogger case.

Joan Didion at Town Hall

On February 5, <i>The New York Review</i> celebrated its 50th anniversary at Town Hall in New York City. In this recording from the event, Darryl Pickney discusses his lifelong engagement with the <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/50-years/2013/mar/14/darryl-pinckney-james-baldwin-reviews/">writing of James Baldwin</a>.

Darryl Pinckney at Town Hall

‘The premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.’

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