As a war correspondent in Iraq, George Packer’s reports for The New Yorker often included interviews with ordinary Iraqis, a technique he learned as a 20-something volunteer for the Peace Corps. “I learned how to approach people with whom I had almost nothing in common and draw out the thread of their lives,” said Packer, recalling his time in a remote village in Togo, West Africa. Packer, the author of two novels and four books of non-fiction, including the award-winning “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq” (2005), spoke at “The Art of the Feature Essay,” at the Graduate Center, along with fellow New Yorker contributors Paul Goldberger, Jane Kramer and Daniel Mendelsohn.
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The independent American film director and screenwriter, John Sayles, has been credited with helping kick-start the indie film genre with his 1981 work, “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” which was selected by the National Film Preservation Board for inclusion in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Before making movies, Sayles was an accomplished fiction writer, with books that include his 1978 National Book Award-nominated, “Union Dues.” In celebration of his latest book, described as “his most spectacular work of fiction to date,” the Gotham Center for New York History hosted an event at the Graduate Center of Sayles reading from the novel, “A Moment in the Sun.”
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In today’s topsy-turvy world, what used to make sound, economic sense is no longer the case, according to Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics and a New York Times columnist. “We are in Bizzaro-land now. Both consumer and government saving depresses the economy because the money isn’t being spent at businesses that will spur investment,” says Krugman, who appeared at the Graduate Center as part of the series, “Perspectives: Conversations on Policy and Place with Peter Beinart,” to discuss the Obama’s administration’s missteps, failed policies in other countries and a reluctance, across the board, to accept responsibility. “If people had actually listened to economists,” says Krugman, “then the profession deserves a lot of the blame.”
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On March 25, 1911, a fire engulfed the Triangle Waist Company, a fabric factory in Greenwich Village, killing 146 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian women, nearly half still in their teens. It was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City. The catastrophe, and the working conditions it revealed, inflamed public opinion leading to a reform in conditions. As part of day-long conference, marking the one hundredth anniversary of the tragedy, Annelise Orleck, history professor at Dartmouth College, called attention to the safety and health concerns of today’s workers. “There are people in Bangladesh garment shops, and sweatshops in Los Angeles, making clothes under the same conditions as those 100 years ago,” says Orleck, who was part of a panel sponsored by the Gotham Center for New York City History. “As we talk about Triangle, and the humanity of these young women and men who died, let’s try to take that outrage and apply it to the present day, because we need it.”
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Jazz pianist and composer Fred Hersch, hailed by Downbeat as “one of the small handful of brilliant musicians of his generation,” has been living with AIDS since the early 1990s, and during the same time has recorded a portfolio of work the New York Times calls a “manifesto of contemporary jazz.” But in 2008, Hersch fell into a near fatal AIDS-related coma, which left him in mental and physical seclusion. “I was very fearful that I would never be able to express myself at the piano the way I’ve been doing my whole life,” says Hersch, in a conversation with music critic Gary Giddins at the Graduate Center. But with intensive therapy and rehabilitation, Hersch learned to walk — and play the piano — again. What was most important, says Hersch, was “to get back on the horse as soon as I could.”
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To be a talented book reviewer it helps to have a certain set of skills, among them the ability to enter the author’s mind, according to Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review. “You have to abandon yourself to a book, immerse yourself in its world,” says Tanenhaus, who spoke at a Graduate Center event, “The Art of the Book Review.” “That doesn’t mean simply recapitulating what you’ve read,” says Tanenhaus, “you have to create your own drama around it through a driving and suspenseful narrative prose.” Panelists also included Henry Finder, editorial director of The New Yorker, Radhika Jones, senior editor for Time and Time.com, Robert Messenger, book editor for the Wall Street Journal, and moderator, André Aciman, director of the Writers’ Institute at the Graduate Center.
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Despite record-setting losses suffered by Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, President Obama still has the edge — if only by default — to be re-elected, says New York Times columnist, Gail Collins. “All of our presumptions about how well Barack Obama will do in the 2012 election are based on the incredibly awful Republican candidates that appear to be out there ready to run against him.” Collins was joined by Mike Allen, chief political correspondent for Politico, in a discussion at the Graduate Center hosted by Peter Beinart, associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and senior political writer for The Daily Beast, that examined the likely field of Republican candidates and what a second Obama term might mean for the nation.
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Freed from the legal bonds of slavery by the state’s Emancipation Act of 1827, New York’s black leaders moved from local to national politics in the decades leading up to the Civil War. At a Graduate Center event, Carla Peterson, author of the new book, “Black Gotham: A Family History of Africans in Nineteenth-Century New York City,” focused on the experience of students at the Mulberry Street School and how it propelled them into political activism, as well as trade and business. “Education formed character, led to respectability, provided wealth and helped to make you cosmopolitan,” says Peterson, who discussed the challenges she faced finding source material for this forgotten part of American history, in a program sponsored by the Gotham Center for New York City History.
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A junior at Macaulay Honors College at Hunter and eyewitness to the massive demonstrations in Egypt, watched firsthand as social media platforms like Facebook were used to help mobilize the political protests. “People who normally would use the Internet as a distraction, now used it as a tool to organize,” says Alex Schindler, who was studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo during the weeks-long uprising. Schindler and Norhan Basuni, a senior at the CUNY Baccalaureate program at John Jay College, who was also in Cairo, shared their experiences at the CUNY Study Abroad Re-entry Conference at the Graduate Center. “The day after the government started messing with the Internet, Tahrir Square went from a few thousand protesters to 100,000 people,” says Schindler.
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Quiet and laconic by nature, the 30th president of the United States was dubbed “Silent Cal,” but, according to the author of a new biography, “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” his place in history deserves much more. “Calvin Coolidge is the last best president we never knew about,” says Amity Shlaes, who delivered the 2011 Hayek Annual Lecture in Economics at the Graduate Center. Shlaes, a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and syndicated columnist for Bloomberg News, says Coolidge’s record “was too good, it was offensively good as governor, vice president and as president — he was too popular to bear.”
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