Story in the Public Square

Books have always seemed like self-contained worlds to me.  Pick up a book, and you can transport yourself to any time in history—or the future. Delve into the mystical or the romantic.  Books help us to open our minds and our hearts, and over the last 30 years, Jonathan Karp has put more of those books into the hands of readers than just about anyone else.

Jonathan Karp has been president and CEO of Simon & Schuster since May 2020. He joined Simon & Schuster in June 2010 as publisher of their flagship imprint and was promoted to president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing in 2018.  Karp worked briefly as a reporter for The Providence Journal and then The Miami Herald before being hired in 1989 by Random House.  He worked there for 16 years, rising to editor-in-chief of the Random House division.  He moved to Hachette Book Group in 2005, where he founded the Twelve imprint.  There, Karp published the acclaimed bestselling works, “True Compass” by Edward M. Kennedy, “God Is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens, and “War” by Sebastian Junger.  Since joining Simon & Schuster, Karp has overseen the publication of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, “What Happened” by Hillary Clinton, “Fear” by Bob Woodward, “Frederick Douglass” by David Blight, the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History, “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen, “In One Person” by John Irving, and “The Library Book” by Susan Orlean.

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The analytical mind can explain the world around us, but the creative mind can help create our future. Dr. Julian Chambliss explores the power of Afrofuturism in comic books, the expression of creativity in the midst of the pandemic, and the way we think about and process history as a society.

Chambliss explores the real and imagined city. From planning and community development to comic books and popular culture, his research, teaching, and writing explore how perceptions shape policy and action creating our collective urban experience.  Chambliss studied urban history at the University of Florida and focused his attention on policy formation, culture, regionalism, and civic infrastructure issues.  His research evolved to focus on urban development and culture in U.S. cities.  Chambliss served as Professor of History in the Department of History at Rollins College from 2004 to 2018.  He joined the Department of English at Michigan State University in 2018 with a joint appointment in the Department of History and as core faculty in Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research.  There, he teaches courses exploring critical making, or the process of creative synthesis that animates his class projects, comics and culture in the United States.  In 2019, Chambliss joined the Michigan State University Museum as the Val Berryman Curator of History, where he designs generative digital projects that use the classroom as a platform for students to act as co-researchers to trace community development, document diverse experience and explore culture.  Chambliss is one of the producers of “Every Tongue Got To Confess,” a podcast exploring the experiences and stories of communities of color.

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The pandemic has had a profound effect on the entertainment industry, disrupting live performances and posing challenges for production in both film and television.  Ida Darvish and Josh Gad are two of the bright lights of Hollywood and they tell us that the creative process continues.

Ida Darvish is a producer and actor who has played multiple characters in the “Assassin’s Creed” video game franchise, a common house proprietor on “The Mandalorian,” and Marta Alvarez in Tom Hank’s “Inferno.”  She and her husband have both appeared in “She Wants Me,” “The Lost Nomads: Get Lost!,” and “Big Guy.” Together, they run a production company called “Angry Child,” which has produced a number of shows, notably “Central Park” and “1600 Penn.”

Josh Gad is an actor and singer and is known for voicing Olaf in the “Frozen” franchise, playing LeFou in the live-action adaptation of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” and Elder Arnold Cunningham in the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon,” for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical.  Gad played Skip Gilchrist in the political sitcom “1600 Penn” on NBC, and a fictionalized version of himself on FX’s The Comedians, alongside “Billy Crystal.”  Several of his other film roles include “The Rocker,” “The Internship,” “Love & Other Drugs,” “The Wedding Ringer,” “The Angry Birds Movie,” “A Dog’s Purpose,” “Marshall,” and Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express.”  He has also appeared in “ER,” “The Daily Show,” “Modern Family,” “New Girl,” “Bored to Death,” and “Numb3rs.” In 2020, he began starring in the HBO comedy series “Avenue 5.”  His continuing pandemic series, “Reunited Apart,” has been very popular and it raises money for many charitable causes.

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In the midst of a year that saw pandemic disease, social unrest, and bare-knuckled politics, Hollywood churned out a tremendous body of work—even while theaters closed and films created for the big screen streamed directly to our homes.  Pete Hammond says this year’s Academy Awards reflect the issues facing Americans.

Hammond is currently Chief Film Critic for Deadline Hollywood, where he has been the Awards Columnist, covering the seemingly year-round Oscar and Emmy seasons, for the past seven years.  For the past eight years, he has been Awards Editor and Columnist for Deadline and previously covered a similar column for the Los Angeles Times.  He has also served as a frequent contributor to Variety and as a film critic for Boxoffice magazine, Backstage magazine, Maxim magazine and Movieline.  He is in his seventeenth year as host of the “KCET Cinema Series” in Los Angeles, and UCLA extension’s “Sneak Preview” for the past ten years.  He also hosts the TV series, “Must See Movies,” which showcases classic films every Friday night and Saturday afternoon on KCET.  He is the recipient of five Emmy nominations for his television writing and is the winner of the 1996 Publicists Guild of America’s Press Award.  He is the second journalist in the organization’s 50-year history to receive the award twice, winning again in 2013.  He also served on the Board of Governors for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences representing writers for six years.

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Stories from the Second World War continue to educate, fascinate, and even entertain audiences around the world. Tim Gray tells those stories to educate a new generation about the horrors of war and the heroism of the generation that saved the free world.

Gray is a national award-winning documentary film director, producer and writer who has produced and directed 17 documentary films on the personal stories of the World War II generation. His latest film is “Surrender on the USS Missouri,” which focuses on the individuals who served on the ship and witnessed the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945, which ended World War II.  All of Gray’s films air nationally on American Public Television and globally in China, Australia, France and England.  In 2012, his World War II Foundation dedicated the Richard D. Winters Leadership Monument in Normandy, France, honoring American leadership on D-Day and approved by the late Major Richard D. Winters of WWII’s Band of Brothers.  The foundation oversaw all the fundraising for the thirteen-foot statue and organized the dedication event in France, attended by the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division and former Secretary of Homeland Security, Gov. Tom Ridge. Prior to documentary film making, Gray worked as a television sports and news anchor and reporter for over fifteen years in U.S. markets including Michigan, Washington State, Florida, New York and Rhode Island.

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Some call it climate change, others call it a crisis, and still others call it a hoax.  Dr. Michael Oppenheimer tells us to take seriously the impact climate change will have in all of our lives.

Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), the Department of Geosciences, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.  He is the Director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE) at SPIA and Faculty Associate of the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Program and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Oppenheimer joined the Princeton faculty after more than two decades with The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a non-governmental, environmental organization, where he served as chief scientist and manager of the Climate and Air Program.  He continues to serve as a science advisor to EDF.  He has authored over 200 articles published in professional journals and is co-author, with Robert H. Boyle, of a 1990 book, Dead Heat: The Race Against The Greenhouse Effect. He is co-author of the book Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy, published in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press.  Oppenheimer is a long-time participant in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, most recently serving as a Coordinating Lead Author on IPCC’s Special Report on Oceans and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate in 2019 and as a Review Editor on the upcoming Sixth Assessment Report.

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Anybody on social media has seen it: dueling posts, arguing over a hot political issue. The protagonists in these online debates are generally sincere in their convictions, but Vanessa Otero says that too many of us remain unaware of the media biases that shape our understanding of the world.

Otero is the creator of the Media Bias Chart®, the viral image that rates news organizations on their reliability and degree of political bias in their work and maps them accordingly.  The chart prompted lively discussions about where people get their news when it was published.  She is the CEO of Ad Fontes Media, the company she founded in 2018 to fulfill the need revealed by the popularity of the Chart—the need for an easy-to-understand, reliable news rating system.  Otero seeks to impact the way consumers, educators, and organizations deal with today’s complex media landscape through her work at Ad Fontes Media.  She is a practicing patent attorney and earned her J.D. from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.

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The intersection of America’s criminal justice system and mental health is long and, often, misunderstood.  Christine Montross tells us that America’s largest mental health institution isn’t a psychiatric hospital, it’s Cook County Jail in Chicago, Illinois.

Dr. Christine Montross is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.  She is also a practicing inpatient psychiatrist and performs forensic psychiatric examinations.  She completed medical school and residency training at Brown University, where she received the Isaac Ray Award in Psychiatry and the Martin B. Keller Outstanding Brown Psychiatry Resident Award.  She received her undergraduate degrees and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of Michigan.  Montross’s first book, “Body of Work,” was named an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times and one of The Washington Post’s best nonfiction books of 2007.  Her second book, “Falling Into the Fire,” was named a New Yorker “Book to Watch Out For.”  Her latest book, “Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration,” was named a New York Times Book to Watch For, a Time Magazine Book to Read in July and an Amazon.com Best Book of the Month. She has also written for many national publications including The New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, Time Magazine, The Washington Post Book World, Good Housekeeping and O, The Oprah Magazine.

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In the first months of the Biden administration, we’ve seen an intentional effort by the new president to return the country’s politics to some sense of “normal.” S.E. Cupp is a conservative voice who yearns for a return to substance in American politics.

Cupp is a CNN political commentator and practical conservative who brings her distinct outlook to CNN programming and special political coverage. She most recently hosted CNN’s “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered,” a weekly program covering the intersection of politics and media. She previously led a panel-driven show on HLN that debated contemporary issues impacting American public life. She joined CNN as a contributor in 2013 and HLN as a host in 2017. Cupp also hosted “S.E. Cupp’s Outside With Insiders,” a digital series on CNN.com where she took political insiders to the great outdoors. Guests on the show included Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) among others. From 2013 to 2014, Cupp co-hosted “Crossfire” on CNN, the relaunched political debate program with panelists Newt Gingrich, Stephanie Cutter and Van Jones. Before joining CNN as a host and political commentator, Cupp co-hosted MSNBC’s roundtable show, “The Cycle.”

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It’s been one year since the coronavirus pandemic upended life across the globe. Dan Barry reminds us that behind the headlines and the previously unimaginable counts of cases and deaths, there are stories of individual lives interrupted and, all too often, cut short by the pandemic.

Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist for The New York Times, having written both the “This Land” and “About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including sports, culture, New York City, and the nation. Since joining The Times in September 1995, Barry has covered many major events, including the World Trade Center disaster, the destructive wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the police shooting death of a young black man. His many honors include the 2003 American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting, for his coverage of the first anniversary of Sept. 11; the 2005 Mike Berger Award, from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; and the 2015 Best American Newspaper Narrative Award. He has also been nominated as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice: once in 2006 for his slice-of-life reports from hurricane-battered New Orleans and from New York, and again in 2010 for his coverage of the Great Recession and its effects on the lives and relationships of America. His most recent honor is the sixth-annual Pell Center Prize for Story in the Public Square, conferred in April 2018.

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