The Vault

Podcast Intellectuals Panel #3 with Joy Connolly, Barry Lam, and Aurora Hutchinson

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research.

In this third, and final, panel, Robert Boynton moderates a conversation which asks, “Can podcasts save the university?” In it, Joy Connolly, Barry Lam, and Dr. Aurora Hutchinson discuss what role podcasts might play in the university’s system of hiring, promotion and tenure.

Robert S. Boynton is the director of the Literary Reportage program, and associate director of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is author of The Invitation Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’ s Abduction Project, and The New New Journalism.

Joy Connolly is president of the American Council of Learned Societies and a scholar of ancient Roman political thought and literature. At ACLS, she has led initiatives such as Doctoral Futures to broaden the scope and reach of humanistic inquiry. She is the author of The State of Speech and The Life of Roman Republicanism, and is completing a new book called All the World’ s Pasts.

Professor Barry Lam earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton, taught at Vassar, and recently moved to UC Riverside. He is the host and executive producer of Hi-Phi Nation, a story-driven podcast about philosophy, at Slate magazine. He is also an Associate Director of the Marc Sanders Foundation, which promotes excellence in philosophy and public philosophy.

Dr Lauren Arora Hutchinson, previously a BBC journalist, is an award-winning audio storyteller, an academic, and the inaugural director of the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab, a studio and incubator for world class stories at the intersection of science, ethics, medicine and public health, at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Lauren’s immersive audio work has premiered at IDFA and the Venice Film Festival. She has a PhD in History of Science with a focus on Oral History, and was a Wellcome Trust Imperial Media Fellow. She is the host of the signal award winning podcast playing god?

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Podcast Intellectuals Panel #2 with Ellen Horne, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Barry Lam, and Julia Barton

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research.

In this second panel of the day, Ellen Horne moderates a conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika, Barry Lam, and Julia Barton, three veterans who have made a specialty of working on creative, idea-informed series.

Professor Ellen Horne directs the Podcasting and Audio Reportage concentration at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She was the executive producer and editor of Admissible: Shreds of Evidence, and was host, reporter, and producer for Luminary’s Lies We Tell. Horne was the executive producer of WNYC’s Radiolab, where she won George Foster Peabody Awards, Third Coast Awards, and the Kavli Science Journalism Award. Her new documentary, Age of Audio, tells the story of the podcast from birth to boom to today.

NYU Professor Chenjerai Kumanyika specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. His podcast Empire City was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best podcasts of 2024. He was the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, a podcast on the Civil War, and he is the collaborator for Scene on Radio’s Season 2 “Seeing White,” and Season 4 on the history of American democracy.

Julia Barton is an award-winning podcast, audiobook, and radio editor. She was the executive editor of Pushkin Industries, where she helped develop Revisionist History and Against the Rules. She’s the editor of Malcolm Gladwell’s audiobook The Bomber Mafia, Michael Specter’s Fauci, and Michael Lewis’s unabridged Liar’s Poker and companion podcast. Her 2019 series, Spacebridge, was called “dazzling” by The New Yorker. She is the author of the audio history newsletter, Continuous Wave.

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Podcast Intellectuals Podcast Panel #1 with Benjamen Walker and Fanny Gribenski

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In the first panel, podcaster Benjamen Walker discusses his work with NYU media studies professor Mara Mills as they produce Tuning Time, a podcast about the politics of time stretching technology. Professor Mills is an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of disability studies, Science and Technology Studies, and sound studies. She teaches in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and is Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. Her work on “disability and media” spans disability arts and technoscience, with a focus on the history, politics, and cultures of electronics and digital media. Benjamen Walker is a radio writer and producer. He is one of the co-founders of the podcast network Radiotopia from PRX, and for a decade hosted and produced his award winning program Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything.

The first panel concluded with a presentation by NYU musicologist Fanny Gribenski in which she discusses her current project, The Elephant in the Piano: Music, Ecology, Empire. The book, and podcast, is an investigation of the 19th century piano through a material history of its primary components: ivory, wood, felt, and metal. Professor Gribenski is a historical musicologist who specializes in the history of musical and sonic practices. Her first book, L'Église comme lieu de concert. Pratiques musicales et usages de l'espace (Paris, 1830–1905) analyzes the role of music in the production of sacred spaces. Tuning the World: The Rise of 440 Hertz in Music, Science, and Politics, 1859-1955 (University of Chicago, 2023) traces the rocky path towards international pitch standardization.

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Nadine Gordimer: “Living in South Africa’s Interregnum” James Lecture, October 14, 1982

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit Nadine Gordimer’s James Lecture on the political landscape of South Africa, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on October 14, 1982.

In 1982, resistance to South Africa’s apartheid was growing increasingly militant, and the state’s brutal repression heightened this tension.

In her lecture, Gordimer speaks directly to this political landscape, describing the period as an “interregnum." She discusses the crisis of white identity in South Africa, the relationship between art and politics, the urgency for an alternative political left working toward what she calls a democracy without economic and military terror.

This lecture was the basis of Gordimer’s essay “Living in the Interregnum,” published in the New York Review of Books in January of 1983.

Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She authored fifteen novels, including The Conversationalist, Burger’s Daughter and July’s People, over two hundred short stories, and several volumes of essays. She was awarded the Booker prize for the Conversationalist in 1974 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She died in 2014 at the age of 90 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Lukas Foss: A "New American Music Series" Gallatin Lecture, April 15, 1982

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of Gallatin Lectures at NYU, Foss discusses the state of American contemporary music, musical minimalism, and his own approach of combining serial elements with spontaneous composition.

Foss was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, on August 15, 1922, the son of a lawyer and a painter. He began studying piano and music theory when he was 7, and sketched out an opera when he was 11. His family fled to Paris in 1933, and arrived in the U.S. in 1937. He attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and studied composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale.

In 1953, Foss succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1962, “Time Cycle,” a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, premiered with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. From 1971 to 1988 Foss was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. After he left the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in 1990, Foss appeared as a guest conductor and pianist with orchestras around the world. He died in New York City on February 1, 2009.

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The Epic Story of America's Great Migration: A Talk by Isabel Wilkerson

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

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.

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On Michael Jackson: A Lecture by Margo Jefferson

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In September 2006, Margo Jefferson spoke to the Institute about her book, On Michael Jackson (Vintage, 2007). Jefferson received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for criticism when she was at the New York Times. Her 2015 book, Negroland: A Memoir, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. And in 2022, she published, Constructing a Nervous System, a memoir in fragments. She has taught at NYU, The New School, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she is a professor of professional practice.

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Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: A Lecture by Anthony Grafton

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton, where he has taught since 1975. He is an historian of early modern Europe, and the author and co-author of over a dozen books, including The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997), and Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2020).

In November 2006 he spoke to the Institute about Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Harvard University Press, 2006), which he co-wrote with Megan Hale Williams.

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"America: Now and Here": A Lecture by Artist Eric Fischl

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Artist Eric Fischl was born in 1948 in New York City and grew up in the Long Island suburbs. His paintings first received critical attention for depicting the dark, disturbing undercurrents of mainstream American life. In 1972 he received a B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts.

In February 2012, Fischl spoke to the Institute about his work, and about his project “America: Now and Here,” a traveling multi-disciplinary exhibition designed to encourage a national dialogue about America through art. The project began when Fischl invited a group of visual artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers to submit a work of art reflecting their points of view on, and hopes for, America. The idea grew out of his conviction that the country had grown more polarized in the years after 9/11, and was in danger of losing a sense of its place and direction in the world. The truck-based roving museum and performance space launched on May 5th, 2011 in Kansas City, before traveling to Detroit and Chicago.

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The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Eric Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929. In 1938 he and his family fled to Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He studied history and literature at Harvard, and received an MD from NYU. He is a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University, and won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on memory.

In addition to his science textbooks, Kandel has written several books for a general readership, including In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2007), and The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves (2018).

In 2012 he spoke to the Institute about his book The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012).

About the book:

At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today.

The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women's unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death.

Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers--Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele--inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today's cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.

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Shakespeare in America

Sat, 18 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

James Shapiro spoke at the Institute in 2014 about Shakespeare in America, the anthology he edited for the Library of America. He is the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Professor Shapiro is the author of many books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare in a Divided America, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle award for non-fiction. In addition, he is the author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991); Shakespeare and the Jews (1996); Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (2000); 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), which was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for the best non-fiction book published in Britain; and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010).

His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books. He is currently Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater in New York City.

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The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this 2014 episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear from Betty Medsger. Medsger was a Washington Post reporter in March 1971, and received a cache of stolen FBI files that detailed the elaborate surveillance activities the bureau was using against Vietnam war protesters and others whom J. Edgar Hoover deemed “subversive.“ All Medsger knew about the documents was that they had been stolen by a group of anonymous individuals who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. In 2014, she revisited the story in her book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI (Vintage, 2014). In it, she tells the story of an unlikely group of academics and ordinary citizens who broke into a suburban FBI office and shed light on the way the intelligence community was spying on its own citizens.

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Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault we hear from Rebecca Goldstein, an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her first book was her 1983 novel, The Mind Body Problem. Goldstein spoke to the Institute in 2006 about her book, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Schocken Books, 2009).

A bit about the book:

In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty-three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza's progeny.

In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition' s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza's philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe' s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.

Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero--a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.

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Nicholas Lemann, "Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream" (FSG, 2019)

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Nicholas Lemann is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a professor of journalism at Columbia. He is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (FSG, 2019). Lemann spoke at the Institute about Transaction Man in 2019.

Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of great wealth has coincided with the fraying of social ties and the rise of inequality. How did all this come about?

In Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explains the United States'--and the world's--great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras. Adolf Berle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's chief theorist of the economy, imagined a society dominated by large corporations, which a newly powerful federal government had forced to become benign and stable institutions, contributing to the public good by offering stable employment and generous pensions. By the 1970s, the corporations' large stockholders grew restive under this regime, and their chief theoretician, Harvard Business School's Michael Jensen, insisted that firms should maximize shareholder value, whatever the consequences. Today, Silicon Valley titans such as the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman hope "networks" can reknit our social fabric.

Lemann interweaves these fresh and vivid profiles with a history of the Morgan Stanley investment bank from the 1930s through the financial crisis of 2008, while also tracking the rise and fall of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and the family-run car dealerships at its heart. Incisive and sweeping, Transaction Man is the definitive account of the reengineering of America and the enormous impact it has had on us all.

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.

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The Happiness Myth: A Talk by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 2006, Jennifer Michael Hecht spoke to the Institute about her book, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong. Hecht is a poet and historian, who holds a Ph.D. in the history of science/European cultural history from Columbia University. She has published four books of nonfiction and three books of poetry. She has taught in the MFA programs at Columbia University and the New School.

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Ian Buruma on "Year Zero: A History of 1945"

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ian Buruma is the author, co-author and editor of over a dozen books. He has been an editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review and The New York Review of Books. In this talk, he discusses Year Zero: A History of 1945 (Penguin, 2014).

Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it.

In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political "reeducation" was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective.

A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma's own father's story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war's end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into "normalcy" stand in many ways for his generation's experience.

A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

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The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In April 2014, David Bromwich spoke at the Institute about his forthcoming book, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Harvard UP, 2014). Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University, and the author of studies of Hazlitt and Wordsworth.

While Edmund Burke is commonly seen as the father of modern conservatism, Bromwich argues that he was a more subtle and interesting thinker. Burke defended the rights of disenfranchised minorities, protested against the cruelties of English society, and agitated for peace with America.

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Deirdre Bair on Artist Saul Steinberg

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear a 2011 talk by Deirdre Bair about the artist Saul Steinberg. Bair received the 1978 National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett. Since then, she has written biographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Carl Jung, and Al Capone. In 2019, she published a memoir, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me. Bair’s biography of Saul Steinberg was published in 2012.

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The End of Books: A Lecture by Robert Coover

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

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.

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Sennett and Foucault on Sexuality and Solitude (1979)

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In 1979, sociologist and NYIH founder Richard Sennett, and philosopher Michel Foucault, discussed the connections between the history of sexuality and self consciousness. In this episode from the Vault, the two discuss their research and, by extension, the underpinnings of the idea of solitude.

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Rousseau's Ideas About Censorship in the Arts

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In 1982, the Institute held a multi day discussion of censorship. In this session from the Vault, sociologist Richard Sennett talks about Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about censorship in the arts.

The discussion is moderated by Aryeh Neier, and includes Sidney Morgenbesser, Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, Richard Gillman, Frances Fitzgerald, Karen Kennerly, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Michael Scammell.

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On W. H. Auden

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 10:00:00 -0000

In 1983, ten years after W. H. Auden’s death, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a series of readings and discussions of his work. In this episode from the Vault, Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, moderates a discussion between Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender.

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Why are Insects so Scary? On Insects in Films.

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

This episode from the Vault is a lecture by May Berenbaum about why insects are so scary. Professor Berenbaum is an American entomologist whose research focuses on the chemical interactions between herbivorous insects and their host plants. She teaches entomology at the University of Illinois, and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2014. She is also the organizer of the annual Insect Fear Film Festival.

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Comedies of 'Fair Use': Lewis Hyde on Owning Art and Ideas

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In April 2006, The Institute held a two day symposium about copyright and intellectual property, titled Comedies of Fair Use. In this session, Lewis Hyde talks about owning art and ideas.

Hyde is a cultural critic and scholar, whose work focuses on the nature of imagination, creativity, and property. He is best known for his books, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, and Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art.

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Edmund Leach on Roman Jakobson's Contributions to Linguistics

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear the1982 Gallatin Lecture, in which Sir Edmund Leach discussed the work of Roman Jakobson, who he met in 1960, at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Jakobson was one of the pioneers of structural linguistics, and a major influence on Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. He taught at Harvard from 1940 until his retirement in 1967. Leach was a British social anthropologist, and the provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979.

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"Gone with the Wind" Revisited

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this week’s episode from the Institute’s Vault, Molly Haskell talks about her 2009 book, Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited, published by Yale University Press.

Haskell grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and studied at the Sorbonne. She came to New York in the sixties to work for the French Film office, where she wrote a newsletter about French films. She wrote about movies for the Village Voice, Vogue, and New York magazine.

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Historian Laurence Stone on the Role and Revival of Narrative in History

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

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.

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Second Thoughts on Consistency: A Lecture by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In October 1981, Hans Magnus Enzensberger gave the Institute’s James lecture, titled “Second Thoughts on Consistency.” Enzensberger, who died in November, 2022, at the age of 93, was a German translator, editor, author, and poet. He was born in Bavaria, and was just 15 years old when the Third Reich collapsed. After studying literature and philosophy in university, he earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris. Enzensberger wrote in both English and German. In addition to novels, he has written more than five volumes of poetry, including collections for children.

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Leonardo da Vinci and Vassari’s "Lives of the Painters"

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the Vault, we hear Harry Berger’s talk about Leonardo da Vinci and Vassari’s "Lives of the Painters." Harry Berger was a scholar of Renaissance English literature who wrote books about art history, anthropology, and philosophy. He taught at UC Santa Cruz, where he was an emeritus professor until he died in 2021, at age 96.

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Eric Hobsbawm on "Literacy and the Tower of Babel"

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode from the Vault, we hear from historian Eric Hobsbawm, a frequent visitor at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His talk, Literacy and the Tower of Babel, took place in November 1984.

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Clothes in Literature: A Talk by Anne Hollander

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this 2008 episode from the Vault we hear from fashion historian Anne Hollander, a longtime member of the Institute, and former president of the PEN American Center. Hollander was the author of Seeing Through Clothes, Moving Pictures, and Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress. At the time of her death, in 2014, she was working on a book about clothes in literature, which is the subject of this talk.

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Tod Gitlin on the Recovery of American Ideals

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear from Tod Gitlin. Gitlin was president of the Students for a Democratic Society, and went on to become a sociologist, political activist, and journalist, teaching at Berkeley, NYU and Columbia. He wrote sixteen books, and spoke at the Institute in 2007 about his book, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals. Gitlin died in February 2022.

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Greil Marcus on the Death of His Father

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this 2008 episode of The Vault, Greil Marcus reads from a Three Penny Review essay about the death of his father, who went down with the USS Hull in 1944, six months before Marcus was born. Marcus is a music journalist and cultural critic. His books include Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces, and Invisible Republic.

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His Sister, Her Monologue: A Discussion with Hilton Als

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this 2011 episode from The Vault, Hilton Als reads from, and discusses, His Sister, Her Monologue, a novella he published in Mcsweeney's #35. Als is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and his theater criticism was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is the author of two books. The Women, published in 1996., and White Girls, which came out in 2014. "A Pryor Love," His New Yorker profile of Richard Pryor appeared in 1999.

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Samantha Power on Hannah Arendt and Human Rights

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, Samantha Power describes how Hannah Arendt influenced her thinking about politics and human rights. Power spoke during a two day symposium-- “Hannah Arendt Right Now”--which explored the philosopher’s impact on the 21st Century. The 2006 event was held on the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth.

Samantha Power was Barack Obama’s human rights adviser, and then served as the US Ambassador to the United Nations. She is the author of several books, including A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won the 2003 Pulitzer prize. She is a professor of practice at Harvard’s Law School and Kennedy School.

In the second half of the episode, Azar Nafisi responds to Power. Nafisi is best known for her 2003 book, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

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Learning to Drive: A Talk by Katha Pollitt

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

A longtime Institute member, Katha Pollitt is an American poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. Her column for The Nation magazine, “Subject to Debate” won a National Magazine Award in 2003.

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, Pollitt talks about her 2007 book, Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, a collection of personal essays.

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On Hannah Arendt and Humanitarianism

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

From the Institute’s Vault, we have an excerpt from a two day symposium--“Hannah Arendt Right Now”--which explored the philosopher’s impact on the 21st Century. The 2006 event was held on the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth.

In this episode, Dr. Rony Brauman describes how Arendt influenced his thinking about the politics of humanitarian aid. Brauman was president of Doctors without Borders from 1982 to 1994. In 1999, he co-directed The Specialist - Portrait of a Modern Criminal, a documentary about the trial of Adolf Eichman. Samantha Power responds to Brauman’s presentation. Power was the US ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017, and author of A Problem From Hell, America and the Age of Genocide, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

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On Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem"

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The focus of this episode is Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The session begins with historian Anthony Grafton, whose father, a journalist, once wrote about Arendt. The second speaker is Dr. Rony Brauman, the co-directed The Specialist: Portrait of a Modern Criminal, a documentary about the trial of Adolf Eichman. The third speaker is Margarethe von Trotta, the German director whose 2012 film about Hannah Arendt focuses on the Eichmann trial. The session concludes with Pamela Katz, who wrote the screenplay for Hannah Arendt.

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Azar Nafisi and Ladan Boroumand on Arendt and Iran

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 09:02:00 -0000

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we have an excerpt from a two day symposium--“Hannah Arendt Right Now”--which explored the philosopher’s impact on the 21st Century. The 2006 event was held on the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth. In this session, Azar Nafisi and Ladan Boroumand talk about how Arendt’s work on totalitarianism helped them understand the Islamic Revolution in Iran, where both of them were born. Azar Nafisi - is best known for her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Ladan Boroumand is an historian and human rights advocate. She is the author of several articles on the French Revolution, Iran’s Islamic revolution, and the nature of Islamist terrorism.

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Kanan Makiya and Jonathan Schell on Hannah Arendt, Iraq, Vietnam, and Totalitarianism

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 17:30:00 -0000

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we have an excerpt from a two day symposium--“Hannah Arendt Right Now”--which explored the philosopher’s impact on the 21st Century. The 2006 event was held on the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth. In this session, Kanan Makiya discusses Arendt’s influence on his thinking with Jonathan Schell. Makiya was born in Baghdad and educated at MIT. His book, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, was published in 1989. Makiya was a proponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Schell, who died in 2014, was a writer for The New Yorker and The Nation. His 1967 book, The Village of Ben Suc, chronicled the devastation of a South Vietnamese village by American forces. He wrote many pieces against the war in the New Yorker.

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Jonathan Schell and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on Arendt and the Nuclear Question

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 17:17:00 -0000

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we have an excerpt from a two day symposium--“Hannah Arendt Right Now”--which explored the philosopher’s impact on the 21st Century. The 2006 event was held on the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth. In the opening session, Jonathan Schell and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl discuss Arendt’s thoughts on the nuclear question. Schell, who died in 2014, was a writer for The New Yorker and The Nation. His 1982 book, The Fate of the Earth, is a meditation on the consequences of nuclear war. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a longtime member of the Institute, died in 2011. She was a doctoral student of Arendt’s, and author of Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, the first biography of Arendt.

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Timothy Snyder on Tony Judt

Wed, 25 May 2022 17:09:00 -0000

In this week’s episode from the Vault, we revisit a 2013 presentation by the Yale historian, Timothy Snyder, about the book he wrote with the historian, Tony Judt.

Judt was diagnosed with ALS in 2008 and died in 2010. He spent those two years writing books and lecturing, as well as holding weekly conversations with Snyder. The result was Thinking the Twentieth Century, which was published in 2012.

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Fair Use and Documentary Film

Mon, 02 May 2022 19:40:00 -0000

In April 2006, the Institute held a symposium about copyright and intellectual property, titled Comedies of Fair Use. This panel is about documentary film, and was moderated by Duke professor law James Boyle.

It begins with Amy Sewell, whose 2005 documentary, Mad Hot Ballroom looks at the lives of New York City public school kids, as they prepare for a citywide ballroom dancing competition. Charles Sims is a copyright and first amendment expert at the law firm of Proskauer Rose.

Pat Aufderheide is co-author of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, and professor at American University. Hugh Hanson teaches copyright and trademark law at Fordham University School of Law

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Masha Gessen and David Remnick on Putin

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 21:56:00 -0000

Institute fellow, and New Yorker staff writer, Masha Gessen is one of the foremost critics of Vladimir Putin. In 2014, Gessen spoke at the Institute with New Yorker editor David Remnick about Gessen's book, Words Will Break Cement, about Pussy Riot. Much of the conversation focused on Putin's ambitions for an imperial Russia.

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Lawrence Lessig on Fair Use

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 20:18:00 -0000

In April 2006, the Institute held a two day symposium about copyright and intellectual property, titled Comedies of Fair Use.

The event began with a keynote address by Lawrence Lessig, who currently teaches at Harvard Law School. Lessig is the author of twelve books, and his work has had an enormous impact on discussions of intellectual property and, more recently, the challenge institutional corruption presents to democracy.

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Jonathan Lethem on Fair Use

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 16:06:00 -0000

In April 2006, The Institute held a two day symposium about copyright and intellectual property, titled Comedies of Fair Use. At it, the novelist Jonathan Lethem made a presentation on his essay-in-progress, the final version of which would be published as The Ecstasy of Influence, in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s magazine.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (11): Scarlet Kim

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 17:20:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features ACLU lawyer Scarlet Kim.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (12): Discussion

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 19:03:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” In this final episode, Lawrence Weschler leads a discussion about what society should do about solitary confinement with Scarlet Kim, Juan Mendez, Robert King, and members of the audience.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (10): Juan Mendez

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 20:39:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features Juan Mendez, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (9): Lisa Guenther.

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 20:35:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features philosopher Lisa Guenther.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (7): Shane Bauer and Robert King

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 20:32:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features journalist Shane Bauer and prison activist Robert King.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (6): Breyten Breytenbach

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 20:29:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features the poet, artist and novelist Breyten Breytenbach.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (5): Mike Daisy

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 17:09:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features monologist Mike Daisy.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (4): The Yes Men and Samantha Holmes

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 17:07:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” The first presentation is by Jacques Servin and Mary Notari, members of The Yes Men, a performance activist group. Then we hear from avant garde artist and mosaicist Samantha Holmes.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (2): Joshua Foer and Stuart Firestein

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 16:55:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features Joshua Foer, the 2006 USA Memory Champion, and Stuart Firestein, Columbia University chair of Biology.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (3): Catherine Chalmers, Carl Skelton, Walter Murch

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 20:11:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary.” In this episode, we hear from insect photographer Catherine Chalmers, media critic Carl Skelton, and sound editor Walter Murch.

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Should You Ever Happen to Find Yourself in Solitary (1): Lawrence Weschler, Tony Kushner, and Alastair Reid

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 19:40:00 -0000

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” In this episode, Lawrence Weschler talks with playwright Tony Kushner. It concludes with a poetry reading by Alastair Reid

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Distracted: Attention in the Digital Age

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 17:39:00 -0000

Never before has attention been such a precious resource. So on May 19, 2015, the New York Institute for the Humanities held a discussion titled, Distracted: Attention in the Digital Age. Moderated by Virginia Heffernan, the panelists were Winifred Gallagher, David Mikics, Mark Edmundson, and Matthew B. Crawford.

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Legal Scholar Derrick Bell on Racial Libel as American Ritual

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 17:19:00 -0000

In 1995, legal scholar Derrick Bell spoke to the Institute about Racial Libel as American Ritual. Professor Bell was one of the founders of critical race studies. He taught at Harvard Law School until 1990, when he left to protest the school's lack of female African American faculty. He taught at NYU Law School until his death in 2011.

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Steve Wasserman Remembers Christopher Hitchens

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 20:45:00 -0000

In 2012, editor and literary agent Steve Wasserman spoke about his friend Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011. Wasserman has been the editorial director of New Republic Books, Hill & Wang, Times Books and, most recently, Heyday, an independent publisher in Berkeley. He was also the editor of the LA Times Sunday Book Review, and an editor-at-large for Yale University Press.

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William Finnegan on "Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country"

Wed, 27 May 2020 21:00:00 -0000

William Finnegan, a New Yorker staff writer, and Pulitzer prize winner, talks about his work-in-progress, Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, which was published in 1998.

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Ben Moser on Susan Sontag

Tue, 05 May 2020 22:07:00 -0000

Biographer Benjamin Moser talks about his 2019 biography of Susan Sontag, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Moser’s previous book, a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

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Art Spiegelman on the Memory Industry

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 14:15:00 -0000

Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, took part in the 2011 New York Institute for the Humanities symposium, “Second Thoughts on the Memory Industry.”

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Censorship and Writing: With Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 18:45:00 -0000

The opening session of the NYIH 1980 conference on Censorship and Writing, moderated by NYRB editor Robert Silvers, with a presentation by Aryeh Neier, and comments by Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag.

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Francine Prose on Anne Frank

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 18:43:00 -0000

Francine Prose talks about Anne Frank, the subject of her 2009 book, at the 2011 New York Institute for the Humanities symposium, “Second Thoughts on the Memory Industry.”

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Eric Hobsbawm on History in the Post Cold War World

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 18:51:00 -0000

In October, 1995, the great intellectual historian Eric Hobsbawm visited the Institute to give a talk entitled, "Inventing Your Own History," on the new challenges to how history is told in the post Cold War world.

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Elisabeth Young-Bruehl on "Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children"

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 15:27:00 -0000

In this Vault episode from 2011, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl talks about her book, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children. The author of landmark biographies of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, Young-Bruehl was a long time member of the Institute. She died of a pulmonary embolism two weeks after this talk.

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Alfred Kazin on American Literature

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 14:49:00 -0000

In 1984, the scholar and critic Alfred Kazin visited the institute to talk about the long shadow Emerson cast over American (and international) literature. In this episode of The Vault, he discusses and defends his views of a writer who was critical to his sense of what American literature might embody.

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Philip Gourevitch: Black and White and Gray All Over--Some Thoughts on the Problems and Politics of Journalistic Evenhandedness

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 18:19:00 -0000

In 2000, writer Philip Gourevitch lectured on the problem of point of view in political coverage. In this episode of The Vault, he discusses “Black and White and Gray All Over: Some Thoughts on the Problems and Politics of Journalistic Evenhandedness.”

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Philip Glass on "Satyagraha" and "Koyaanisqatsi"

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 21:58:00 -0000

In 1982, the composer Philip Glass presented the NYIH Gallatin Lecture at NYU. In this episode of The Vault, he discusses his relationship to theater and his turn to working with texts--particularly his work on the opera Satyagraha and his then-forthcoming composition for the film Koyaanisqatsi

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Charles Rosen: Memory in Romantic Song Cycles

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 16:37:00 -0000

The writer and pianist Charles Rosen combined musicianship and critical acuity to a degree of accomplishment matched by few figures in the twentieth century. In this episode, we revisit Rosen’s 1978 lecture at the institute, on stage and at the keyboard, titled “Memory in Romantic Song Cycles.”

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Ryszard Kapuscinski: Herodotus

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 16:36:00 -0000

In 2004, journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski gave a luncheon lecture about the Greek historian Herodotus. He described Herodotus as the “first reporter,” a globalist who traveled to the edges of the known world to learn about how people other than the Greeks lived. In Herodotus’s Histories Kapuscinski finds the origins of modern reportage itself. An expanded version of the lecture was published in 2007 as Travels With Herodotus.

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Susan Sontag: Illness as Metaphor

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 18:50:00 -0000

In October of 1977, Susan Sontag delivered one of the institute’s five James Lectures for that year. Her topic was “Illness as Metaphor”. She explored the truth that it was no longer possible, as she wrote, “to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.” Though she did not directly reference it, she herself was being treated for breast cancer at the time. The lecture was published in 1978, first as three essays in the New York Review of Books, and then as a book. It went on to become one of Sontag’s best-known pieces of writing.

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Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton: Hitch-22

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 20:48:00 -0000

At a luncheon of institute fellows in May of 2010, Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton sat down for a conversation about Hitchens’s forthcoming memoir, Hitch 22.

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V. S. Naipaul (part 2): A Bend in the River

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 22:00:00 -0000

The work of V. S. Naipaul, who died in August 2018 at age 85, provided an excoriating examination of what it means to be a colonial and postcolonial subject. In 1979, the novelist paid a visit to NYU in order to deliver the James Lectures at the New York Institute for the Humanities. In the second of two archival episodes, Naipaul reads an excerpt from his 1971 novel In a Free State and a passage from his then-just-released A Bend in the River, soon to become one of his most celebrated—and controversial—works.

Special thanks to DJ Cashmere for his work on this episode.

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V.S. Naipaul (part 1) : In A Free State

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 21:53:00 -0000

The work of V.S. Naipaul, who died in August 2018 at age 85, explored the depths of the postcolonial experience, beginning with his youth in his native Trinidad. In 1979, the novelist visited NYU to deliver the New York Institute for the Humanities’ James Lectures. In the first of two archival episodes, Naipaul lectures on his experience as a young reader and in the “incomplete space” of the Caribbean and reads from his Booker Prize-winning 1971 novel In a Free State.

Special thanks to DJ Cashmere for his work on this episode.

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An Introduction to NYIH Studios

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 20:14:00 -0000

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

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Elizabeth Holtzman on Impeachment

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 13:26:00 -0000

As a new member of Congress in 1973, Elizabeth Holtzman participated in deliberations over the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon. In this lecture given in 2006, she reflects on the legacy of impeachment from Nixon to Bill Clinton and argues for its use against George W. Bush.

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