Both recalling his life story and recounting many of the major advances in twentieth-century science, renowned physicist Dyson shares his autobiography through letters. Labyrinth and the Princeton Public Library are pleased to welcome him to the store and invite you to join us.

 

While recognizing that quantum mechanics “demands serious attention,” Albert Einstein in 1926 admonished fellow physicist Max Born that the theory “does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One.” Aware that “there are deep mysteries that Nature intends to keep for herself,” Freeman Dyson, the 94-year-old theoretical physicist, has nonetheless chronicled the stories of those who were engaged in solving some of the most challenging quandaries of twentieth-century physics.

 

Written between 1940 and the early 1980s, these letters to relatives form an historic account of modern science and its greatest players, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and Hans Bethe. Whether reflecting on the horrors of World War II, the moral dilemmas of nuclear development, the challenges of the space program, or the considerable demands of raising six children, Dyson offers a firsthand account of one of the greatest periods of scientific discovery of our modern age.

 

Professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Freeman Dyson is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including Dreams of Earth and Sky, The Scientist as Rebel, Infinite in all Directions, and Disturbing the Universe.

Unfinished is a field-changing collection edited by Joao Biehl, which explores the plasticity of human subjects and lifeworlds, advancing the conceptual terrain of an anthropology of becoming. We invite you to a presentation and discussion.

 

Peoples becomings trouble and exceed ways of knowing and acting, producing new possibilities for research, methodology, and writing. The contributors to this volume creatively bridge ethnography and critical theory in a range of worlds on the edge, from war and its aftermath, economic transformation, racial inequality, and gun violence to religiosity, therapeutic markets, animal rights activism, and abrupt environmental change. Defying totalizing analytical schemes, these visionary essays articulate a human science of the uncertain and unknown and restore a sense of movement and possibility to ethics and political practice. Unfinished invites readers to consider the array of affects, ideas, forces, and objects that shape contemporary modes of existence and future horizons, opening new channels for critical thought and creative expression.

 

João Biehl is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and the author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Arcadio Diaz-Quinones is Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. His publications include El almuerzo en la hierbal; La memoria rota: ensayos de cultura y politica;and Sobre los principios: los intelectuales caribeños y la tradición. Adriana Petryna is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl; Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices; and When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects.

 

This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Anthropology Department and is part of the Princeton Migrations Series. For more information and a listing of all events in this series, please visit princetonmigrations.org

What is fueling rural Americas outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And, beyond economic and demographic decline, is there a more nuanced explanation for the growing rural-urban divide? Join us for a presentation and discussion of these urgent issues.

 

Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into Americas small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order -- the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities — underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans anger, their culture must be explored more fully.

 

We hear from farmers who want government out of their business, factory workers who believe in working hard to support their families, town managers who find the federal government unresponsive to their communities needs, and clergy who say the moral climate is being undermined. Wuthnow argues that rural Americas fury stems less from specific economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening to the social fabric of small towns. Rural dwellers are especially troubled by Washingtons seeming lack of empathy for such small-town norms as personal responsibility, frugality, cooperation, and common sense. Wuthnow also shows that while these communities may not be as discriminatory as critics claim, racism and misogyny remain embedded in rural patterns of life.

 

Moving beyond simplistic depictions of the residents of Americas heartland, The Left Behind offers a clearer picture of how this important population will influence the nations political future.

 

Robert Wuthnow is Professor of Social Sciences at Princeton University. His many books include American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability; Small-Town America; and Remaking the Heartland. David Miller is founder and Director of the Princeton Faith Work Initiative and Lecturer in Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement.

A leftist foreign policy with a clear moral basis is long overdue. We invite you to a discussion with one of America’s foremost political thinkers.

Foreign policy, for leftists, used to be relatively simple. They were for the breakdown of capitalism and its replacement with a centrally planned economy. They were for the workers against the moneyed interests and for colonized peoples against imperial (Western) powers. But these easy substitutes for thought are becoming increasingly difficult. Neo-liberal capitalism is triumphant, and the workers’ movement is in radical decline. National liberation movements have produced new oppressions. A reflexive anti-imperialist politics can turn leftists into apologists for morally abhorrent groups. In Michael Walzer’s view, the left can no longer (in fact, could never) take automatic positions but must proceed from clearly articulated moral principles.

 

In this book, adapted from essays published in Dissent, Walzer asks how leftists should think about the international scene—about humanitarian intervention and world government, about global inequality and religious extremism—in light of a coherent set of underlying political values.

 

Michael Walzer served as editor of the political journal Dissent for more than three decades. He has written about a wide variety of topics in political theory and moral philosophy. His many influential books include Just and Unjust Wars, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, and The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions.

Sharp, succinct storytelling and breathtaking prose combine in this new novel by the author of the New York Times editor’s pick, Ties. His work is beautifully rendered in English by Jhumpa Lahiri, who will read from Trick and discuss both the novel and the art of translation with fellow-translator and Italian scholar Alessandro Giammei. This event is part of the Princeton Migrations Series.

 

Imagine a duel between an elderly man and a mere boy. The same blood runs through their veins. One, Daniele Mallarico, is a successful illustrator whose reputation is slowly fading. The other, Mario, is his four-year-old grandson. The older combatant has lived for years in solitude, focusing obsessively on his work. The younger one has been left by his querulous parents with his grandfather for a 72-hour stay. Shut inside an apartment in Naples that is filled with the ghosts of Mallarico’s own childhood, grandfather and grandson match wits, while outside lurks Naples, a wily, violent, and passionate city whose influence is not easily shaken.

 

Trick is a gripping, wry, brilliantly devised drama, “an extremely playful literary composition,” as Jhumpa Lahiri describes it in her introduction, about aging, family, art, and reconciling with one’s past.

 

Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist. He was born in Naples and lives in Rome. He is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including First Execution, Via Gemito, winner of Italys most prestigious literary prize, the Strega, and the critically acclaimed Ties. Jhumpa Lahiri is the Pulitzer prize winning author of The Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, and Unaccustomed Earth, among other books. Her works originally written in Italian are In Other Words and The Clothing of Books. She is also an accomplished translator from the Italian, most recently Starnone’s previous book, Ties, and teaches Creative Writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts. Alessandro Giammei is Lecturer in the Humanities Council and French Italianas well as Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University.

 

The Princeton Migrations Series is a community-wide investigation of the theme of migration taking place throughout the region from February through May. Spearheaded by Princeton University Art Museum, the project includes exhibitions, readings, lectures, film screens and performances by more than 20 community partners and a host of campus organizations and departments. More info at princetonmigrations.org

 

 

**please note: this event is free, but tickets are required. They can be picked up after 2/15 at Labyrinth during store hours. 2/person limit.**

 

Co-sponsored by Dorotheas House and Princeton Universitys Lewis Center for the Arts

The end of retirement? From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon’s CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Join us for a conversation about some of the invisible casualties of the Great Recession.

 

Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, an older population has taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads: migrant laborers who call themselves “workampers.” On frequently traveled routes between seasonal jobs, Jessica Bruder meets people from all walks of life: a former professor, a McDonald’s vice president, a minister, a college administrator, and a motorcycle cop, among many others—including her irrepressible protagonist, a onetime cocktail waitress, Home Depot clerk, and general contractor named Linda May.

 

In a secondhand vehicle she christens “Van Halen,” Bruder hits the road to get to know her subjects more intimately. Accompanying Linda May and others from campground toilet cleaning to warehouse product scanning to desert reunions, then moving on to the dangerous work of beet harvesting, Bruder tells an eye-opening tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy—one that foreshadows the precarious future that may await many more of us. At the same time, she celebrates the exceptional resilience and creativity of these quintessential Americans who have given up ordinary rootedness to survive.

 

Jessica Bruder is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on subcultures and the dark corners of the economy. She has written for Harper’s, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Bruder teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism. Matthew Desmond is the recipient of a McArthur Genius Fellowship and the author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Carnegie Medal. He is professor of Sociology at Princeton University.

Renowned historian Joan Scott and her colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, Peter Coviello, discuss how secularism has been used to justify the subordination of women.Please join us.

 

Joan Wallach Scott’s acclaimed and controversial writings have been foundational for the field of gender history. With Sex and Secularism, she challenges one of the central claims of the “clash of civilizations” polemic—the false notion that secularism is a guarantee of gender equality. Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term “secularism” when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity.

 

Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women’s subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism. Challenging the assertion that secularism has always been synonymous with equality between the sexes, Sex and Secularism reveals how this idea has been used to justify claims of white, Western, and Christian racial and religious superiority and has served to distract our attention from a persistent set of difficulties related to gender difference—ones shared by Western and non-Western cultures alike.

 

Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and adjunct professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her many books include The Fantasy of Feminist History, The Politics of the Veil and Gender and the Politics of History. Peter Coviello is current member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He is Professor of English at the University of Illinois and the author of  author of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature and Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America. His current work looks to reconceive secularism as biopolitics.

How does structural economic change look and feel? How are such changes normalized? Who represents hope? Who are the cautionary tales? Please join us for a discussion with two eminent cultural critics of the changing nature of work and capitalism between the 1980s and 2016 through the prism of Detroit and of works by and about African Americans.

 

Hamera’s Unfinished Business argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be understood apart from issues of race, and specifically apart from images of African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times. It insists that Michael Jacksons performances and coverage of his life, plays featuring Detroit, plans for the citys postindustrial revitalization, and Detroit installations The Heidelberg Project and Mobile Homestead have something valuable to teach us about three decades of structural economic transition in the U.S. Jackson and Detroit offer examples of the racialization of deindustrialization, how it operates as a structure of feeling and as representations as well as a shift in the dominant mode of production, and how industrializations successor mode, financialization, uses imagery both very similar to and very different from its predecessor.

 

Judith Hamera is Professor of Dance in the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, with affiliations in American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Urban Studies, Princeton University. She is the author of Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City.  Jill Dolan is Dean of the College, Professor of Theater, and Annan Professor of English at Princeton University. Her books include The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism on Stage and Screen; Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre; Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance; Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. Her most recent book is Wendy Wasserstein.

The Wilson College Signature Lecture Series, Labyrinth Books, The Princeton Public Library, and Princeton University’s Council of the Humanities and Ferris Seminars in Journalism invite you to join Amy Goodman for a talk on the threats to journalism and a free press, and the role of independent media in reporting on movements for social change. The talk will be followed by a book signing of the just-released paperback version of Amy Goodman’s latest NYT bestseller, Democracy Now!: 20 Years Covering the Movements Changing America. She will be joined at the signing by one of her co-authors, Denis Moynihan of Democracy Now!

This event is free and open to the public but tickets are required and can be picked up at Labyrinth Books during store hours starting Wednesday, April 5, 2017. Two tickets per person.

In 1996 Amy Goodman began hosting a show on Pacifica Radio called Democracy Now! to focus on the issues and movements that are too often ignored by the corporate media. Today Democracy Now! is the largest public media collaboration in the US, broadcasting on over 1,400 public television and radio stations around the world, with millions accessing it online at DemocracyNow.org. In their new book Amy, along with her journalist brother, David, and co-author Denis Moynihan, share stories of the heroes—the whistleblowers, the organizers, the protesters—who have brought about remarkable change.

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now! An acclaimed international journalist, she has won the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the Alternative Nobel Prize; a lifetime achievement award from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism; the George Polk Award; Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting; and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Amy is the New York Times bestselling author, with Denis Moynihan, of The Silenced Majority and Breaking the Sound Barrier; and with David Goodman, of Democracy Now!,Exception to the Rulers; Static; and Standing Up to the Madness. She is a syndicated columnist for King Features. Denis Moynihan has worked with Democracy Now! since 2000. He is a bestselling author and a syndicated columnist with King Features.

Peter Singer is often described as the world’s most influential philosopher. He is also one of its most controversial. He helped launch the animal rights and effective altruism movements and contributed to the development of bioethics. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words. We invite you for what promises to be a lively and wide-ranging conversation between two renowned scholars who are both deeply engaged in the public sphere.

In this new book of brief essays, Singer applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness. Singer asks whether chimpanzees are people, smoking should be outlawed, or consensual sex between adult siblings should be decriminalized, and he reiterates his case against the idea that all human life is sacred, applying his arguments to some recent cases in the news. In addition, he explores, in an easily accessible form, some of the deepest philosophical questions, such as whether anything really matters and what is the value of the pale blue dot that is our planet. The collection also includes some more personal reflections, like Singer’s thoughts on one of his favorite activities, surfing, and an unusual suggestion for starting a family conversation over a holiday feast.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and Professor at the University of Melbourne. He first became well known internationally in 1975 with the publication of Animal Liberation. His other books include How Are We to Live?; The Ethics of What We Eat; and The Most Good You Can Do. Robert George is Professor of Jurisprudence and Politics at Princeton. His books include In Defense of Natural Law; Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality; The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in Crisis; and Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism.