Free Library Podcast Free Library of Philadelphia

In conversation with Robert E. Hamilton, Head of Eurasia Research - Eurasia Program, Foreign Policy Research Institute

Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Endowed Lecture

The White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, David E. Sanger has been a member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist teams, including in 2017 for international reporting. His bestselling books include The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power; Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power; and The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, which was adapted into an award-winning HBO documentary. Sanger is also a regular contributor to CNN and teaches national security policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In New Cold Wars, he offers an in-depth account of the United States' high-stakes struggles against two very dissimilar adversaries-Xi Jinping's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Colonel (Retired) Robert E. Hamilton, Ph.D., is the Head of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Eurasia Program and an Associate Professor of Eurasian Studies at the U.S. Army War College.  In a 30-year career in the U.S. Army, spent primarily as an Eurasian Foreign Area Officer, he served overseas in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Germany, Belarus, Qatar, Afghanistan, the Republic of Georgia, Pakistan and Kuwait.  He is the author of numerous articles and monographs on conflict and security issues, focusing principally on the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.  He is a graduate of the German Armed Forces Staff College and the U.S. Army War College and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy, a Master's Degree in Contemporary Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from the University of Virginia.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/18/2024)

In conversation with Patrick Behrer, Research Economist, Development Economics, World Bank

How the subtle but significant consequences of a hotter planet have already begun-from lower test scores to higher crime rates-and how we might tackle them today. In Slow Burn, R. Jisung Park draws upon vast amounts of raw data and novel economics to examine the consequences of climate change on an astonishing array of social groups and institutions. An assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, environmental and labor economist he holds positions in the School of Social Policy and Practice and the Wharton School of Business. He has spent more than a decade investigating and writing about economic inequalities and outcomes created by climate change. A Rhodes Scholar, a research affiliate at the Institute of Labor Economics, and a faculty fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Park has consulted with such organizations as the World Bank and the New York City Departments of Education and Health.

Patrick Behrer is an Economist in the Sustainability and Infrastructure team of the World Bank's Development Research Group. Behrer's work focuses on the economics of air pollution, climate change, and climate adaptation. His work has focused on the impacts of air pollution and climate change on human capital formation and the relationship between agriculture and air pollution. His work leverages big data from online and administrative sources and recent advances in satellite remote sensing technology. Prior to joining the World Bank in 2021, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in 2020 from Harvard University in Public Policy.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/17/2024)

Dennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he also serves as co-director of the Center for Comparative Media. Affiliated with Columbia's Data Science Institute, he is a former fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and worked as a Microsoft engineer in the Windows group, where he wrote code that runs on millions of personal computers around the world. His articles, which span topics ranging from literary theory to computational narratology, can be found in such journals as Amodern, New Literary History, and boundary2. In Literary Theory for Robots, Tenen takes readers on a centuries-spanning trip through automation to explore the relationship between writers and emerging technologies.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/11/2024)

In conversation with award-winning journalist and broadcaster Tracey Matisak

Acclaimed for her study of the intersections of pop music, contemporary Black U.S. culture, and sex and gender, sociologist Tricia Rose is the author of Longing to Tell, The Hip Hop Wars, and, most notably, Black Noise, which is considered a foundational text for the academic study of hip hop. She is the Chancellor's Professor of Africana Studies and the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and she has presented seminars and workshops on a wide range of topics to scholarly and general audiences. The recipient of grants and fellowships from the Mellon, the Robert Wood Johnson, the Ford, and the Rockefeller Foundations, Rose has been widely profiled and featured on several national media outlets. In Metaracism, she presents a definitive map of the vast and often obscured practices, policies, and beliefs that proliferate systemic racism in the United States.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/10/2024)

Praised for her ''darkly funny and painfully sharp'' (Los Angeles Times) fiction, Lydia Millet is the author of the novel A Children's Bible, shortlisted for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top 10 book of 2020; the story collection Love in Infant Monkeys, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and the novel Dinosaurs, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her other honors include awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a longtime editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity. We Loved It All, named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Oprah Daily and Literary Hub, is a memoir that ponders the richness of the human experience amidst the environmental calamities that threaten life on Earth.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 4/9/2024)

Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture

In conversation with Rebeca L. Hey-Colón, Professor of Latinx Studies, Temple University

Awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2013, poet, essayist, and fiction writer Julia Alvarez is renowned for her lyrical, poignant, politically insightful books. These many works include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which details the lives of four sisters before and after their exile from the Dominican Republic; In the Time of the Butterflies, a million-copy bestseller that was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program; and Afterlife, a novel that explores the notion of keeping faith with our fellow humans in a broken world. Alvarez's many awards include the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature. In The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Alvarez explores the very nature of storytelling in the tale of a fiction writer who finds that her buried untold stories have taken on lives of their own.

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(recorded 4/4/2024)