Elected in 2016, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is now serving her fifth term in Congress representing Washington’s 7th District, which encompasses most of Seattle and its surrounding areas including Shoreline, Vashon Island, Lake Forest Park, and parts of Burien and Normandy Park. She is the first South Asian American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and one of only two dozen naturalized citizens currently serving in the United States Congress.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues of the second Trump administration. In each conversation the New York Review‘s Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk to a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including the rule of law, immigration, the state of the left, and the fate of the climate. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post The Future of Progressive Politics appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books, including most recently “H is for Hope: Climate Change from A – Z.” Her 2014 book “The Sixth Extinction” won a Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, and her 2021 book “Under a White Sky” was named one of the ten best books of the year by the Washington Post. She is the editor of “The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009” and co-edited “The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the finest writing on the Arctic and Antarctic.” Kolbert is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and has received a National Academies award, a Heinz Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the BBVA Biophilia Award for Environmental Communication.

Bill McKibben is an author, educator, and environmentalist, who helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, and who has recently helped found Third Act, to build a progressive organizing movement for people over the age of 60.

Jonathan Mingle is an independent journalist. His reporting and writing on the science and politics of climate change, the energy transition, health and technology has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Yale Environment 360, Undark Magazine, Slate, MIT Technology Review and other outlets. He is a recipient of the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, a former Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group. He is the author of two nonfiction books on energy and climate: Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival on the Roof of the World (2015) and Gaslight: The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Fight for America’s Energy Future (2024).

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues of the second Trump administration. In each conversation the New York Review‘s Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk to a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including the rule of law, immigration, the state of the left, and the fate of the climate. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post Climate Action appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Sara Nelson has served as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO since 2014, representing 55,000 of aviation’s first responders at 20 airlines. She has been a union Flight Attendant since 1996 when she started flying at United Airlines. Sara designed the successful payroll support program that was an historic Worker’s First relief program that kept aviation workers connected to their paychecks, healthcare, and other benefits for 16 months during the COVID pandemic, while banning stock buybacks and dividends across the industry and capping executive compensation for two years after the relief period ended making aviation the only industry not to grow in inequality during the pandemic. Sara believes labor should set the agenda every time.

Astra Taylor is a writer, filmmaker, and organizer. She is the director of numerous documentaries and her books include The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and the American Book Award winner The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Her most recent book is Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, co-written with Leah Hunt-Hendrix. She was the 2023 CBC Massey Lecture and she cofounded the Debt Collective, a union of debtors.

Zephyr Teachout is a Professor at Fordham Law School. She is the author of Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuffbox to Citizens United and Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues of the second Trump administration. In each conversation the New York Review‘s Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk to a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including the rule of law, immigration, the state of the left, and the fate of the climate. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post Organizing the Opposition appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Francisco Cantú is a writer, translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. A former Fulbright fellow, he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and an Art for Justice fellowship. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, his writing and translations have also been featured in The New Yorker, Best American Essays, Granta, and VQR, as well as on This American Life. A lifelong resident of the Southwest, he now lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona, where he co-coordinates the Field Studies in Writing Program and DETAINED, a community archive that collects oral histories of people who have been incarcerated in for-profit immigration detention centers.

Julia Preston is a journalist focusing on immigration. From 2017 through 2024 she was a Contributing Writer at the Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism organization reporting on criminal justice and immigration. Before joining the Marshall Project, she worked for twenty-one years at The New York Times. She was the national correspondent covering immigration from 2006 through 2016, and a foreign correspondent in Mexico from 1995 through 2001, among other assignments. She is a 2020 winner of an Online Journalism Award for Explanatory Reporting, for a Marshall Project series on myths about immigration and crime. She won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on international affairs, for a series by four New York Times reporters on drug corruption in Mexico. She was awarded the 1997 Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America. She is the author, with Samuel Dillon, of Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy, 2004, which recounts Mexico’s transformation from an authoritarian state into a struggling democracy.

Héctor Tobar is the author of Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” and the novel The Last Great Road Bum, among other books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction and a Professor of Literary Journalism at the University of California, Irvine.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues of the second Trump administration. In each conversation The New York Review‘s Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk to a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including the rule of law, immigration, the state of the left, and the fate of the climate. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post Vanishing Rights: Immigration, Deportation, and the Rhetoric of Invasion appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Sherrilyn Ifill is a civil rights lawyer and scholar. From 2013–2022, she served as the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. She recently served as a Ford Foundation Fellow and as the Klinsky Visiting Professor for Leadership & Progress at Harvard Law School, and as a fellow at the Museum of Modern Art. Ifill is currently the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights at Howard Law School, where she founded the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy.

Pamela Karlan is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and a founder and codirector of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School. Karlan’s primary scholarship involves constitutional litigation, particularly with respect to regulation of the political process and antidiscrimination law. She has also practiced law at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, focusing on employment discrimination and voting rights. Her public service includes a term as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and two stints at the US Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division. Karlan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, where she serves on the ALI Council.

Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University and serves as regular counsel to the law firm HeckerFink LLP. The title “University Professor” is Harvard’s highest academic honor, awarded to fewer than seventy-five professors in the university’s history. Tribe was appointed in 2010 by President Barack Obama to serve as the first Senior Counselor for Access to Justice and in 2021 by President Joseph R. Biden to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He helped write the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the Marshall Islands, and has published 115 books and articles, including his treatise, American Constitutional Law, cited more than any other legal text since 1950.

About this series

The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues of the second Trump administration. In each conversation The New York Review‘s Advising Editor Fintan O’Toole will talk to a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including the rule of law, immigration, the state of the left, and the fate of the climate. Each event, held on Zoom, will last about ninety minutes and include an audience Q&A session. All events are pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

The post Constitutional Crises appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The most technically innovative and iconoclastic of the three great tragedians, Euripides, considered by Aristotle to be the “most tragic” of them, was famous above all for his penchant for depicting heroines in extremis—so much so that the comic playwright, Aristophanes, wrote a lampoon of the tragedian’s work in which the women of Athens, fed up with being depicted as infanticidal, adulterous, homicidal, and incestuous, plot to assassinate the playwright. In the first three of our plays—Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Medea—we will focus on the representation of femininity in Euripides’ work, focusing on the female characters’ attempts to break out of the social roles that imprison them; while Bacchae, the playwright’s final tragedy, explores gender and sexuality, masculinity and femininity in an astonishingly sophisticated and modern way.

Four one-hour sessions: May 7, 14, 21, and 28. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

About This Series

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

The post Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on Euripides appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The tragedies of Sophocles place heroes characterized by remarkable determination and fixed ideas in situations designed to test the limits of both their convictions and their agency. Ajax, one of the greatest heroes of the Trojan War, must decide whether he can go one living with a humiliation visited upon him by the goddess Athena; Antigone, committed by her conscience to fulfill religious obligations to her dead kin, finds herself pitted against ruthless political power wielded by her uncle, the king. Philoctetes, about a wounded warrior abandoned in the wilds by the Greeks on their way to Troy, explores the tensions between nature and culture, civilization and savagery. And Oedipus, considered by Aristotle to be the model tragedy, brings tragic irony to unparalleled heights as it explores the awful fate of its protagonist, who keeps running into the destiny he seeks to flee.

Four one-hour sessions: April 9, 16, 23, and 30. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

About This Series

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

The post Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on Sophocles appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In his remarkable preface to The Portrait of A Lady, Henry James described the problem posed by the novel as that of “organising an ado about Isabel Archer,” “the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl.” James’s solution was to write arguably the greatest Anglophone novel about the development of consciousness—a novel that insists on perceiving, thinking, and understanding as events, and exciting ones at that. Our discussion of The Portrait of A Lady, which will touch on issues of social and psychological realism, the American and international scenes, illicit affairs and unhappy marriages, will mark the seminar’s shift from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Four one-hour sessions: March 3, 10, 17, and 24. All sessions will start at 5pm EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Merve Emre

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, where she also hosts the podcast “The Critic and Her Publics.”

About This Series

In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James recalled the challenge presented to him by the novel’s main character, Isabel Archer. “By what process of logical accretion was this slight ‘personality,’ the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?” he wondered. “Well, what will she do?” This seminar takes James’s question—“What will she do?”—as crucial to the novel, a genre of fiction that has been particularly interested in how young women determine what to do with their lives. Reading across six novels—Jane Austen’s Emma, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and Elif Batuman’s Either / Or—we will trace the history of the novel through its evolving representations of sex, desire, race, class, and a distinctly female consciousness.

The post What Will She Do?: Merve Emre on Henry James’s <em>The Portrait of a Lady</em> appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The plays of Aeschylus, written in verse of astonishing complexity and density, searingly explore role of fate—as expressed in family curses and divine decrees—in human affairs, while investigating the limits and nature of mortal power. Persians, the only surviving tragedy on a historical (as opposed to mythological theme), imagines, with sometimes surprising sympathy, the aftermath in Persian of the arrogant emperor Xerxes’ defeat by the Greeks at Salamis. The Oresteia, the only surviving trilogy from the tragic canon, investigates the nature of vengeance, guilt, and justice as it traces the ramifications of the murder of Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the Greek expedition against Troy, by his wife Clytemnestra—a slaying that is itself revenge for a series of earlier crimes.

Four one-hour sessions: March 5, 12, 19, and 26. All sessions will start at 7pm EST/EDT. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

About This Series

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

The post Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on Aeschylus appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Homer’s epic about the consequences of a single incident in the final year of the Trojan War magnificently established the terms for the “idea of the tragic” and its accoutrements: the tragic hero, tragic irony, the tragic “flaw.” Confronted with a devastating insult to his honor, the Greek’s greatest warrior, Achilles, withdraws from the fighting as he struggles with the meaning of the choices he has made—not least, the choice to die young in return for everlasting glory. But his withdrawal sets in motion a sequence of events that will result in a loss far greater than the one that spurred his original crisis, precipitating the hero’s climactic confrontation with mortality.

Six one-hour sessions: January 15, 22, 29; February 5, 12, and 19. All sessions will start at 7pm EST. Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

About Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn, the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books, is an award-winning critic, author, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and three collections of essays and reviews, including Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture and Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, both published by New York Review Books. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlet Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.

About This Series

Tragic consciousness—the awareness that human life is bound by inescapable limits beyond our control, and against which we nonetheless struggle as we seek agency and meaning in our lives—has been central to the Western imagination since Homer’s Iliad. In this series of four weekly seminars, the author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, the New York Review’s Editor-at-Large, will lead participants through an exploration of “the idea of the tragic” as expressed in the foundational works of European civilization. The first seminar, devoted to the Iliad—the first great expression of a hero’s struggle with the meaning of mortality in the Western tradition—will be followed by sessions on selected works by the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, examining how notions of fate and agency, destiny and history, glory and abjection, evolved along with tragedy during its century-long heyday in Athens.

The post Tragic Meaning: Daniel Mendelsohn on the <em>Iliad</em> appeared first on The New York Review of Books.