The Vault

Francine Prose talks about Anne Frank, the subject of her 2009 book, at the 2011 New York Institute for the Humanities symposium, “Second Thoughts on the Memory Industry.”

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In October, 1995, the great intellectual historian Eric Hobsbawm visited the Institute to give a talk entitled, "Inventing Your Own History," on the new challenges to how history is told in the post Cold War world.

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In this Vault episode from 2011, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl talks about her book, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children. The author of landmark biographies of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, Young-Bruehl was a long time member of the Institute. She died of a pulmonary embolism two weeks after this talk.

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In 1984, the scholar and critic Alfred Kazin visited the institute to talk about the long shadow Emerson cast over American (and international) literature. In this episode of The Vault, he discusses and defends his views of a writer who was critical to his sense of what American literature might embody.

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In 2000, writer Philip Gourevitch lectured on the problem of point of view in political coverage. In this episode of The Vault, he discusses “Black and White and Gray All Over: Some Thoughts on the Problems and Politics of Journalistic Evenhandedness.”

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In 1982, the composer Philip Glass presented the NYIH Gallatin Lecture at NYU. In this episode of The Vault, he discusses his relationship to theater and his turn to working with texts--particularly his work on the opera Satyagraha and his then-forthcoming composition for the film Koyaanisqatsi

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The writer and pianist Charles Rosen combined musicianship and critical acuity to a degree of accomplishment matched by few figures in the twentieth century. In this episode, we revisit Rosen’s 1978 lecture at the institute, on stage and at the keyboard, titled “Memory in Romantic Song Cycles.”

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In 2004, journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski gave a luncheon lecture about the Greek historian Herodotus. He described Herodotus as the “first reporter,” a globalist who traveled to the edges of the known world to learn about how people other than the Greeks lived. In Herodotus’s Histories Kapuscinski finds the origins of modern reportage itself. An expanded version of the lecture was published in 2007 as Travels With Herodotus.

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In October of 1977, Susan Sontag delivered one of the institute’s five James Lectures for that year. Her topic was “Illness as Metaphor”. She explored the truth that it was no longer possible, as she wrote, “to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.” Though she did not directly reference it, she herself was being treated for breast cancer at the time. The lecture was published in 1978, first as three essays in the New York Review of Books, and then as a book. It went on to become one of Sontag’s best-known pieces of writing.

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At a luncheon of institute fellows in May of 2010, Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton sat down for a conversation about Hitchens’s forthcoming memoir, Hitch 22.

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