Evenings with an Author

A global tour of energy – the builder of human civilization and also its greatest threat.

Power Trip explores how energy has transformed societies of the past and offers wisdom for today’s looming energy crisis. There is no magic bullet; energy advances always come with costs. Scientific innovation needs public support. Energy initiatives need to be tailored to individual societies. We must look for long-term solutions. Our current energy crisis is real, but it is solvable. We have the power.

Michael is based in Paris, France where he serves as the Chief Science and Technology Officer at ENGIE, a global energy & infrastructure services company. Michael is also the Josey Centennial Professor in Energy Resources at the University of Texas at Austin. His expertise spans research and education at the convergence of engineering, policy, and commercialization on topics related to innovation, energy, and the environment. His latest book Power Trip: the Story of Energy was published May 7, 2019 by Basic Books with a 6-part companion series in development for PBS. His first book, Thirst for Power: Energy, Water and Human Survival, addressed the connection between earth’s most valuable resources and offers a hopeful approach toward a sustainable future.

Recorded 11 February 2020

An investigation into the damage wrought by the colossal clothing industry – and the grassroots, high-tech, international movement fighting to reform it by New York Times bestselling author and journalist Dana Thomas.

In Fashionopolis, journalist Dana Thomas surveys the environmental and human cost of a globalized, profit-hungry supply chain: sweatshop labour, ecological degradation, overconsumption, waste and creative exhaustion. As awareness of the damage inflicted on the planet by globalisation and consumerism increases, “Fashionopolis” investigates the way that the clothing industry has become environmentally and ethically unsustainable.

But Fashionopolis also documents renewal, and how technology and purpose are changing how we buy and produce clothes: from 3D printing to clean denim processing, from smart manufacturing to hyperlocalism, from the creation of truly circular fabrics to lab-grown leather. We have all been casual about how we get dressed. Fashionopolis is the first comprehensive look at how to change.

Dana is the author of Gods and Kings and the New York Times bestseller Deluxe. She began her career writing for the Style section of The Washington Post, and she has served as a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Style section and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Architectural Digest. In 2016, the French Minister of Culture named Dana a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. She lives in Paris.

Recorded 14 January 2020

What would Paris be without its souvenirs? Snow globes, keychains, and fridge magnets seem to be everywhere. We often think of souvenirs as worthless junk, but they can be powerful material memories. Join us for Susan’s talk about her own Parisian souvenir collection and about what souvenirs tell us about the city, travel, and ourselves. (With photography by Sarah Torretta Klock.)

Susan Harlan’s essays have appeared in venues including The Guardian US, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Roads & Kingdoms, Literary Hub, The Common, Racked, The Brooklyn Quarterly, The Bitter Southerner, and Public Books. Her book Luggage (Bloomsbury, 2018) takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany our lives. She also writes satire for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Billfold, Avidly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Hairpin, The Belladonna, Janice, and The Establishment, and her humor book Decorating a Room of One’s Own: Conversations on Interior Design with Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Victor Frankenstein, Elizabeth Bennet, Ishmael, and Other Literary Notables was published by Abrams last October. She teaches English literature at Wake Forest University.

Recorded 26 November 2019

George Packer is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a former staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. He has published five other works of non-fiction, including The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2013, as well as two novels and a play.

The late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, wholly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. He embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage, and his story is the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. George will discuss his new biography Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers–a non-fiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

Thomas is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at the American Scholar and a 2019 New America Fellow. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Harper’s and elsewhere, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell and The American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Paris with his wife and children.

Recorded 21 November 2019

In this episode, Emma Jacobs discusses her book, The Little(r) Museums of Paris, part guide-part travelogue through Paris’ landscape of small museums, from the better-known to deeply obscure. Deeply-researched and hand-illustrated, it includes stories and highlights of the collections and conversations with conservators, museum founders and artists.

Emma is a multimedia journalist and illustrator who has reported internationally for NPR, Marketplace and PRI’s The World. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Little(r) Museums of Paris (2019, Running Press) is her first book.

Stephanie Nadalo, PhD, will moderate the conversation. Stephanie is a museum educator and Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons Paris, the European division of Parsons School of Design.  When she is not in the classroom she works as a licensed guide to design and deliver engaging museum pedagogy within Parisian institutions including the Louvre, Rodin Museum, and the Museum of Jewish Art and History.  In addition, she currently serves as the Interim Director of the Parsons Paris MA program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies.

Recorded 8 October 2019

Most people are familiar with the basics of the Cuban Revolution of 1956 to 1959: It was led by two of the 20th century’s most charismatic figures, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara; it successfully overthrew the island nation’s U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista; and it quickly went awry under Castro’s rule. But less is remembered about the amateur nature of the upstart movement, or the lives of its players.

To mark the 60th anniversary of the revolution, Smithsonian magazine writer Tony Perrottet draws on his new book ¡Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History to offer a look at some of the human drama that played out against the backdrop of political upheaval. He surveys how a scruffy handful of self-taught subversives, many of whom were just out of college, young lawyers, literature majors, and art students—including a number of extraordinary women—defeated 40,000 professional soldiers.

Tony’s dive into the revolution reveals fascinating details. How did Castro’s highly organized lover Celia Sánchez whip the male guerrillas into shape? Who were the two dozen American volunteers who joined the Cuban rebels? How do you make land mines from condensed milk cans—or, for that matter, cook chorizo à la guerrilla?

Join Tony for a lively look at a liberation movement that captured the global imagination with its spectacular drama, foolhardy bravery, tragedy, and sometimes,  high comedy—and that set the stage for Cold War tension that pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Recorded 29 October 2019

Another Paris: 10 Walks in the Districts that are Transforming the East of Paris– Industrial Wastelands, Contemporary Architecture, Shared Gardens, Street Art, Coffee Shops…the east of Paris is undergoing a major metamorphosis. By offering itineraries beginning where tourists generally stop, these ten walks invite urban explorers to take side steps and widen their horizons. Venture forth to discover the districts where the heart of the city is now pulsing.

Graduate of Sciences Po Rennes and La Sorbonne, Nicolas Le Goff worked for 10 years on the promotion of the French cultural industries abroad, within the framework of Business France. He was then recruited by the Paris Town Hall to be in charge of innovation in the cultural and digital fields for three years, which led him to join Le Centquatre as a special adviser of the director, José-Manuel Gonçalvès. In this capacity, he ran the international relations of the center and coordinated urban renovation and cultural consulting projects with which Le Centquatre was involved. Two years ago, he decided to become a « Passeur urbain » (urban scout), and now writes alternative guides on the innovative districts of Paris and the Greater Paris Region, and is an independent consultant on how arts and innovation contribute to the attractiveness of cities.

Recorded 9 October 2019

Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl and The Past, and three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She lives in London and is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker and other magazines.

Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead.

In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach was the sanest and kindest of them all, the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.

Late in the Day explores the tangled webs at the centre of our most intimate relationships, to expose how beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again shows that she has ‘become one of this country’s great contemporary novelists. She is equipped with an armoury of techniques and skills that may yet secure her a position as the greatest of them.’ (Anthony Quinn Guardian)

Recorded 17 September 2019

A meditation on race and identity from one of our most provocative cultural critics.

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a “black” father from the segregated South and a “white” mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of “black blood” makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he’d never rigorously reflected on its foundations—but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions.

It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his kids are white, Thomas notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them—or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.

Thomas is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at the American Scholar and a 2019 New America Fellow. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Harper’s and elsewhere, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell and The American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Paris with his wife and children.

Lauren Collins began contributing to The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008. She is the author of When in French: Love in a Second Language, which the Times named as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2016. She is working on a second book, about a coup d’état perpetrated by white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, and its effects on the city during the past hundred and twenty years.

Recorded on 19 November 2019