The Vault

In April 2006, The Institute held a two day symposium about copyright and intellectual property, titled Comedies of Fair Use. At it, the novelist Jonathan Lethem made a presentation on his essay-in-progress, the final version of which would be published as The Ecstasy of Influence, in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features ACLU lawyer Scarlet Kim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” In this final episode, Lawrence Weschler leads a discussion about what society should do about solitary confinement with Scarlet Kim, Juan Mendez, Robert King, and members of the audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features Juan Mendez, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel and Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features philosopher Lisa Guenther. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features journalist Shane Bauer and prison activist Robert King. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features the poet, artist and novelist Breyten Breytenbach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features monologist Mike Daisy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” The first presentation is by Jacques Servin and Mary Notari, members of The Yes Men, a performance activist group. Then we hear from avant garde artist and mosaicist Samantha Holmes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” This episode features Joshua Foer, the 2006 USA Memory Champion, and Stuart Firestein, Columbia University chair of Biology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary.” In this episode, we hear from insect photographer Catherine Chalmers, media critic Carl Skelton, and sound editor Walter Murch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, the Institute held a day long symposium, “Should you ever happen to find yourself in solitary: Wry Fancies and Stark Realities.” In this episode, Lawrence Weschler talks with playwright Tony Kushner. It concludes with a poetry reading by Alastair Reid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Never before has attention been such a precious resource. So on May 19, 2015, the New York Institute for the Humanities held a discussion titled, Distracted: Attention in the Digital Age. Moderated by Virginia Heffernan, the panelists were Winifred Gallagher, David Mikics, Mark Edmundson, and Matthew B. Crawford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1995, legal scholar Derrick Bell spoke to the Institute about Racial Libel as American Ritual. Professor Bell was one of the founders of critical race studies. He taught at Harvard Law School until 1990, when he left to protest the school's lack of female African American faculty. He taught at NYU Law School until his death in 2011. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, editor and literary agent Steve Wasserman spoke about his friend Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011. Wasserman has been the editorial director of New Republic Books, Hill & Wang, Times Books and, most recently, Heyday, an independent publisher in Berkeley. He was also the editor of the LA Times Sunday Book Review, and an editor-at-large for Yale University Press.  Learn more about you...

William Finnegan, a New Yorker staff writer, and Pulitzer prize winner, talks about his work-in-progress, Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, which was published in 1998. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Biographer Benjamin Moser talks about his 2019 biography of Susan Sontag, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Moser’s previous book, a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, took part in the 2011 New York Institute for the Humanities symposium, “Second Thoughts on the Memory Industry.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The opening session of the NYIH 1980 conference on Censorship and Writing, moderated by NYRB editor Robert Silvers, with a presentation by Aryeh Neier, and comments by Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices