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Recent Events
Tuesday, June 7 2016
Danielle Allen at Harvard Book Store
Join Boston Review and Harvard Book Store for an evening with Danielle Allen, Harvard professor, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and author of Boston Review's May/June 2016 forum, "What is Education For?" for a discussion of her new book, Education and Equality.
American education as we know it today—guaranteed by the state to serve every child in the country—is still less than a hundred years old. It’s no wonder we haven’t agreed yet as to exactly what role education should play in our society. Danielle Allen brings us much closer, examining the ideological impasse between vocational and humanistic approaches that has plagued educational discourse, offering a compelling proposal to finally resolve the dispute.
Monday, May 9 at 8:15 p.m.
1395 Lexington Ave.
New York, NY 10128
"Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Contest Winners' Reading
Join 92Y and Boston Review for a reading by the winners of the "Discovery" 2016 Poetry Contest (contest details here). For more details on the event and to purchase tickets, visit 92Y's event page.
Wednesday, December 9 at 7:00 p.m.
Poetry Reading and Signing at Cambridge Public Library
Join Boston Review along with Harvard Book Store at Cambridge Public Library for a poetry reading and signing featuring some of contemporary poetry's most prominent figures. The event will begin at 7:00 p.m. and will likely be popular, so we recommend showing up early for optimal seating. Boston Review will be there to meet attendees and to offer a complimentary copy of our latest issue when attendees sign up for our e-newsletter. The event is free and open to the public.
Poets in Attendance:
Lucie Brock-Broido
Lucie Brock-Broido’s poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry. She has taught at Bennington College, Princeton University, and Harvard University. Her 2013 book of poetry, Stay, Illusion, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award.
Mary Jo Bang
Mary Jo Bang is the author of seven books of poetry including Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Berlin Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. She served as the poetry co-editor of Boston Review from 1995 to 2005 and is currently a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Her writing is often praised for its deft mixture of post-modern elements with a disciplined, formal control of language.
Stephen Burt
Stephen Burt is a poet, critic, and professor at Harvard University. In 2012, The New York Times called him “one of the most influential poetry critics of his generation.” He has published three collections of poetry and numerous works of criticism; his book, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is currently a professor of English at Harvard University.
Major Jackson
Major Jackson has published four books of poetry. Two of these, Holding Company (2010) and Hoops (2006), were finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature in the Poetry category. His 2002 collection, Leaving Saturn, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent collection, Roll Deep (2015), explores the subjects of human intimacy and war. He is currently the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont.
Tuesday November 3 at 6:00 p.m.
Anne-Marie Slaughter at the Brattle Theatre
Harvard Book Store, Boston Review, and WAM!: Women, Action, and the Media join to welcome president and CEO of the New America Foundation, Anne-Marie Slaughter, for a discussion of her book, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, a thought-provoking examination of the struggle for equality in the workplace and the home in the 21st century.
When Anne-Marie Slaughter accepted her dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey. Her husband and two young sons encouraged her to pursue the job; she had a tremendously supportive boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and she had been moving up on a high-profile career track since law school. But then life intervened. Parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family.
The reactions to her choice to leave Washington because of her kids led her to question the feminist narrative she grew up with. Her subsequent article for The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” created a firestorm, sparked intense national debate, and became one of the most-read pieces in the magazine’s history.
In her new book, she outlines her vision for what true equality between men and women means and how we can reach that goal. For more details and to purchase tickets, visit the Harvard Book Store event page.
Saturday, October 24 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Boston Review at the 2015 Boston Book Festival in Copley Square
Join Boston Review at Massachusetts’ best celebration of authors, presses, and lovers of reading. October 24 is Boston Book Festival’s central event, a free street festival in Copley Square, and
Boston Review will be there all day with merchandise and special BBF-exclusive deals on subscriptions.
Check out the Boston Book Festival website for complete information. Entry to the street festival is free and no tickets are required.
Thursday October 8, 2015 at 6:00 p.m.
Roberta Kaplan at the Brattle Theatre
Harvard Book Store and Boston Review welcome Roberta Kaplan, joined by Eric Lander, to discuss her book, Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA.
Renowned litigator Roberta Kaplan knew from the beginning that it was the perfect case to bring down the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer had been together as a couple, in sickness and in health, for more than forty years—enduring society’s homophobia as well as Spyer’s near total paralysis from multiple sclerosis. Although the couple was finally able to marry, when Spyer died the federal government refused to recognize their marriage, forcing Windsor to pay a huge estate tax bill.
In this gripping, definitive account of one of our nation’s most significant civil rights victories, Kaplan describes meeting Windsor and their journey together to defeat DOMA. She shares the behind-the-scenes highs and lows, the excitement and the worries, and provides intriguing insights into her historic argument before the Supreme Court. A critical and previously untold part of the narrative is Kaplan’s own personal story, including her struggle for self-acceptance in order to create a loving family of her own.
Friday September 18, 2015 at 3:00 p.m.
Daniel Geary and Benjamin Hedin: The Moynihan Report and Civil Rights
In conversation with Eugene Rivers, Daniel Geary and Benjamin Hedin discuss their books, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy and In Search of the Movement: The Struggle for Civil Rights Then and Now.
This event was part of Harvard Book Store’s Friday Forum, which takes place on Friday afternoons during the academic year as a way to highlight scholarly books in a wide range of fields, with a particular focus on local scholars.
Thursday February 26 @ 6 p.m.
“‘The Lip of the Flamingo': Poetry and the Misuse of Language”
A poetry lecture by Timothy Donnelly.
Edison Newman Room, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
About the Bagley Wright Lecture Series:
Charlie Wright, Publisher of Wave Books, established the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry in memory of his late father, the businessman and philanthropist Bagley Wright. The Series is spearheaded by Charlie Wright and Wave Books editor Matthew Zapruder. It provides leading poets with the opportunity to explore in-depth their own thinking on the subject of poetry and poetics, and through financial and logistical support, deliver several lectures that result from these investigations. Lectures are delivered publicly in partnership with several large venues, including the Library of Congress in DC, New York University, Harvard University, the Poetry Foundation, and Seattle Arts and Lectures, and others.
About the author:
Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010; Picador, 2011), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His chapbook Hymn to Life was recently published by Factory Hollow Press and with John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O’Brien he is the co-author of Three Poets published by Minus A Press in 2012. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming Fence, Harper’s, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as well as fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the poetry editor of Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
Tuesday, November 11 @ 4:30 p.m.
SAVING PRIVACY
A forum featuring Reed Hundt, Michael Dearing, and Jennifer Granick
co-sponsored by the Stanford McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Because of Edward Snowden’s remarkable public service, we know that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of some large firms, has amassed an unprecedented database of personal information. The ostensible goal in collecting that information is to protect national security. The effect, according to Reed Hundt, is to undermine democracy.
Hundt—chair of the Federal Communications Commission under President Clinton and early champion of the Internet—argues that the law and traditional checks on political power have not kept pace with the digital realm. How should we respond? Hundt proposes a new compact that encourages citizens to use encryption to protect their information and offers government support for technologies and legislation that enable self-protection. Moreover, the government would have to rely on tried-and-true practices of the criminal justice system, not secret backdoors, to police encrypted digital space.
Stanford University
McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
for more details visit their Web site.
Thursday September 25, 2014 @ 6:00 p.m.
LESSONS FROM MARKET BASKET
An MIT / Boston Review Forum
Couldn't make it? Read our recap here.
There is much to learn from the historic revolt of Market Basket employees and customers that saved its successful business model—featuring low prices and high quality jobs—and brought Arthur T. Demoulas back in control of the company. This MIT / Boston Review Forum brought together experts in leadership, corporate governance, finance, marketing, operations, and labor to discuss the key lessons learned and how to put them to work in teaching and practice and hear directly from people at Market Basket who made it all happen.
We invited students, faculty, staff at MIT and sister universities and members of the public to join us and offer their ideas on what this case means for the future of American business and the education of future leaders.
Featured in this event were:
· Curt Nickisch, WBUR Public Radio Business and Technology Reporter
· MIT Professors Deborah Ancona, Andrea Campbell, Renee Gosline, Tom Kochan, Robert McKersie, Andrew Lo, and Zeynep Ton
· Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz
· CEO of Ownership Associates Christopher Mackin
· AFCSME Organizer Kris Rondeau
· Market Basket Executives
Wong Auditorium
MIT Tang Center
2 Amherst Street
Cambridge, MA
6:00–9:00 p.m.
Monday September 22, 2014 @ 7:00 p.m.
PRIVACY POLICY
Stephen Burt, Dan Chelotti, Jorie Graham, Robert Pinsky, and Thera Webb read from their contributions to Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics
Drones, phone taps, NSA leaks, internet tracking—the headlines confirm it—we are living in a state of constant surveillance, and the idea of “the private sphere" is no longer what it used to be. Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics responds to this timely and crucial issue through the voices of over sixty contemporary poets, including Robert Pinsky, Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Nikki Giovanni, and D.A. Powell. Nature, ethics, technology, sex, the internet—no voyeuristic stone goes unturned in this expansive exploration of the individual, information, and how we are watched.
Free and open to the public, this event is co-sponsored by Harvard Book Store, Black Ocean, and Boston Review.
Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
7:00 p.m.
Thursday May 1, 2014
Matt Taibbi and Robin Young discuss The Divide
Harvard Book Store and Boston Review welcome contributing editor for Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi and award-winning host of NPR's "Here and Now" Robin Young for a discussion of Taibbi's newest book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.
Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail.
In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime—but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side.
Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights.
First Parish Church
1446 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
7:00pm
Purchase your $5 ticket from Harvard Book Store.
Includes a coupon for $5 off the book!
Thursday April 24, 2014
Senator Elizabeth Warren:
A Fighting Chance
Harvard Book Store and Boston Review welcome Senator Elizabeth Warren for a discussion of her forthcoming memoir, A Fighting Chance.
A Fighting Chance is Senator Warren's personal story of her rise from a working class family in Oklahoma to the United States Senate, where she is the senior senator from Massachusetts. The book is a rousing call for protecting the middle class—the backbone of America—and for building a stronger country. It includes her work in the Senate and her improbable campaign to get there; her fight to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; her effort to expose the truth behind the $700 billion bank bailout; and her battles with lobbyists over bankruptcy regulations. Through stories of hope and triumph, the book shows how Americans can wake up a government that has too often been consumed by special interests.
First Parish Church
1446 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
7:00pm
Saturday March 1, 2014
AWP Conference Off-Site Reading:
Amy King and Tyler Mills
with Anomalous Press, Gold Line Press, Ricochet Editions, and Rose Metal Press
6:30–8:30 pm
The Freehold Theater
Featuring Amy King and Tyler Mills for Boston Review; Steve Bradbury for Anomalous Press; Iver Arnegard and Cynthia Marie Hoffman for Gold Line Press; Elizabeth J. Colen, Miriam Bird Greenberg, and Harmony Holliday for Ricochet; Kim Henderson and Gregory Robinson for Rose Metal Press. Free and open to the public.
Thursday March 20–Friday March 21, 2014
The Landscape Listens:
the Voices of Women in American Poetry
with Sonia Sanchez, Robert Pinsky, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jericho Brown, Marie Howe, Vijay Seshadri, Jane Shore, Henri Cole, CD Wright, Afaa Weaver, and others
The Poetry Society of America 2014 national series The Voices of Women in American Poetry celebrates the immense achievement of a wide range of poets, from Phillis Wheatley and Anne Bradstreet to Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton. Distinguished contemporary poets—both male and female—will gather in five cities around the country to discuss an important female predecessor and her influence on their life and work. The series will launch with a one-and-a-half day festival in Boston, co-sponsored by Boston University as well as Boston Review, featuring readings and panel discussions by poets Sonia Sanchez, Robert Pinsky, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jericho Brown,Marie Howe, Vijay Seshadri, Jane Shore, Henri Cole, CD Wright, Afaa Weaver, and others.
Wednesday, January 15
The Syria Dilemma
A panel including Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi
Sponsored by Teaching for Change and Busboys & Poets
2021 14th St NW, Washington, DC 20009
Thursday, February 27
The Uses of Black Political Thought
A panel featuring Nick Bromell, Rev Eugene Rivers, and Brandon M Terry
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138
Monday November 18, 2013
Noam Chomsky: What is Anarchism?
introduced by Nathan Schneider
Noam Chomsky, world-renowned public intellectual and MIT Professor emeritus, will discuss the reasoning behind his fearless lifelong questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. Chomsky’s anarchism is distinctly optimistic and egalitarian. It is a living, evolving tradition, situated in a historical lineage, which emphasizes the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.
This event is based on the topic of Noam Chomsky's new volume, On Anarchism, available from New Press. Nathan Schneider—editor of Waging Nonviolence and author of Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse—will introduce Chomsky and moderate the Q&A.
MIT E51-115, Wong Auditorium
entrance via Amherst Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
Free and open to the public
5:30 p.m.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 @ 4:30 pm
The Case for Climate Engineering
David Keith, with Kenneth Oye and Stephen Van Evera
MIT 32-155 (Stata Center)
32 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
Free and open to the public
Climate engineering—which could slow the pace of global warming by injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere—has emerged in recent years as an extremely controversial technology. And for good reason: it carries unknown risks and it may undermine commitments to energy conservation. Some critics also view it as an immoral human breach of the natural world. The latter objection, David Keith argues, is groundless; we have been using technology to alter our environment for years. But he agrees that there are large issues at stake. On October 30, Keith, Oye, and Van Evra will discuss the possibility of and obstacles to climate engineering. This event is based on the topic of David Keith's new BR Book, A Case for Climate Engineering, available soon from MIT Press.
David Keith is a Harvard Professor of Physics, Applied Sciences, and Public Policy, and Kenneth Oye and Steven Van Evra are MIT Professors of Political Science.
This is an Ideas Matter event, a joint project of Boston Review and MIT’s Political Science Department that brings BR writers together with other experts and practitioners for substantive debate on the challenges of our times.
Thursday, December 6, 2012 @ 4:30 p.m.
Occupy the Future
Chris Hedges, Debra Satz, J. Phillip Thompson, Nadeem Mazen
MIT 26-100
Access via 60 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
Thursday, December 6, 2012
4:30 p.m.
Boston Review has closely followed the Occupy movement and we welcome both the attention it has drawn to societal problems as well as its potential to re-democratize American politics.
On Thursday, December 6th, Debra Satz, director of the Stanford Center for Ethics in Society, leads a panel discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, MIT Professor of Urban Studies and Planning J. Phillip Thompson, and Occupy Boston participant Nadeem Mazen, on the state and future of the Occupy movement. The panel will be moderated by MIT Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy Sally Haslanger.
Climate Change: Science and Politics
Dr. Kerry Emanuel, author of What We Know About Climate Change
MIT Wong Auditorium (in the Tang Center)
70 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
6:00 p.m.
Dr. Kerry Emanuel, one of America’s leading experts on climate change and severe weather, will discuss recent severe weather events, the politics of climate change, as well as his Boston Review Book, What We Know About Climate Change.
“Emanuel’s words are measured and authoritative. His book should help reduce the huge gap between what is understood by the scientific community and what is known by the people who need to know, the public and policymakers.”
—James Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Islam in America
John Bowen and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, with Christopher Lydon
Bartos Theater, MIT E15 Atrium level
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 4–5:30 p.m.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, author of Moving the Mountain, and Professor John Bowen, author of the new Boston Review Book Blaming Islam, join Boston Review and the MIT Political Science Department for a discussion of the state of Islam in the United States, moderated by Christopher Lydon.