With Emmanuel Carrère, Mary Gaitskill and Percival Everett
Moderated by Greil Marcus

Emmanuel Carrère and Percival Everett published their first novels in 1983; Mary Gaitskill published her first book, a collection of short stories so interlinked they read as a novel, in 1988. Since then, in radically different ways, but with a shared commitment to navigating the switchbacks, deadends, locked rooms, and unmarked roads of contemporary life in ordinary language—language always recognizable, regardless of how fantastic or extreme the situations explored might become, as the language that ordinary people speak every day, to others and to themselves—they have created a labyrinth of fiction...

French Fashion and Global Style

With Didier Grumbach and Anne Valérie Hash
Moderated by Mary Davis

In the early part of the 20th century, when Coco Chanel issued the now-famous dictum “Fashion must come up from the streets,” the only sidewalks that mattered were located in the chic arrondissements of Paris or in the seaside resort towns of Deauville or Nice. Today, the streets that count constitute a worldwide network—from Shanghai to Stockholm, Berlin to Beirut. What is the place of French fashion in this global system?

Mathematical Styles & the Process of Discovery

With John F. Nash, Jr. and Cédric Villani
Moderated by Antonin Baudry

Five years ago, the mathematician Cédric Villani, the 2010 Fields Medal winner and the author of Théorème vivant, a work that could be called Theory of Life/Life in Theory, met John Nash at Princeton, but, Villani said, he “did not have the courage to talk to him.” Nash was a legend; Villani was well short of forty.

Olivier Assayas in the Post-May Period

With Olivier Assayas, Larry Gross and
Stephanie Zacharek
Moderated by Greil Marcus

In France, the phrase “Post-May” speaks of the long, even endless shadow cast by the extraordinary events of May and June 1968, when a dispute at a single college campus outside of Paris led to a wildcat general strike that brought France to a standstill and, depending on who was conducting the post-mortem, almost dissolved the country into anarchy or raised the specter of a new way of a life, a new definition of freedom that inspired and tormented people all over the globe...

Special Event: A Conversation between Marjane Satrapi and A. O. Scott

With Marjane Satrapi and A.O. Scott
Moderated by Steve Wasserman

The graphic novelist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi and the critic A.O. Scott will take up questions of creativity and criticism, censorship and audience, the tension between the visual and the word, and much more that could hardly be fixed in advance.

The Wealth of Nations and the Immiseration of Citizens

With Joseph Stiglitz and Gabriel Zucman
Moderated by James Miller

The concentration of wealth is not only a matter of a divide between individuals, classes, social groups, or whole national and regional populations; it is, in a way that the young economist Gabriel Zucman is exploring, its own economy. It is a mystery unfolding in plain sight; it won’t be solved tonight, but it will come into focus. We have ways, both Stiglitz and Zucman seem to say, of making you talk.

Why Do We Still Read Tocqueville?

With Françoise Mélonio, Arthur Goldhammer and Paul Berman
Moderated by John Rockwell

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, appearing in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, based on his travels with Gustave Beaumont in the new republic in 1831—up and down the east coast from Boston to New York to Philadelphia, west to the Michigan wilderness, south to New Orleans—set the template for the foreigner’s journey-through-America, particularly that of the French visitor.

With Alexandra Clert and Matthew Weiner
Moderated by Greil Marcus

How and why these remarkable productions emerged—characters trapping themselves in their own webs in Mad Men, in Engrenages a single crime spiraling out through all levels of society—and in their way came to write and rewrite the history of the times in which they are set, are questions that in themselves will provide an unforgettable drama.