Ages 18

Join Eric Karpeles and Alissa Valles for a discussion of the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski: his life, his work, and the remarkable range of poets he inspired. Karpeles and Valles are the translators of the NYRB Classics titles Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp and Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History, respectively, both of which collect Czapski’s critical writing, authored either about or during his internment in a Soviet Prison Camp between 1939 and 1941.

Throughout history, Cyprus has been variously described as ‘the island of love’, ‘the birthplace of Aphrodite’, ‘the island of saints,’ and ‘the land of lemon and olive trees. In the past half century, Cyprus has also been known as a land of pain and sorrow; an island of division and loss. On this musical journey to Cyprus, Nicoletta Demetriou (voice), Nikitas Tampakis (viola), and Panayotis League (laouto) explore this varied identity, as expressed through the island’s music and song.

Janine di Giovanni is a multi-award winning journalist and author, and CEO/Executive Director of The Reckoning Project. Janine was a war reporter for nearly three decades, from the first Palestinian intifada in the early 1990s to the siege of Sarajevo; the Rwandan genocide; the brutal wars in Sierra Leone, Somalia, Ivory Coast and Liberia to Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. She reported extensively in Iraq pre and post invasion, the Arab Spring, and finally Syria. Her field work for her most recent book took her to Gaza, Iraq, Egypt and Syria.

How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state’s proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities.

One of the most underreported human catastrophes of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the ongoing cultural and existential erasure of the country’s Nadazov Greek population, which, prior to the war, constituted the third-largest ethnic group (after Ukrainians and Russians) in the bitterly contested Donetsk region. Most of these Greeks were concentrated in and around the city of Mariupol, which they founded after Catherine the Great had resettled them from their ancient homeland of Crimea in 1778.