Prior Speakers - Fall 2006 & Spring 2007

Tuesday, October 24, 2006: PETER AND BETHANY YARROW

Father and Daughter and Beyond: A Legacy of Commitment and Activism

Peter and Bethany Yarrow A successful artist and activist, Peter Yarrow's talent is legendary. His gift for songwriting has produced some of the most moving songs that Peter, Paul & Mary have recorded, including "Puff, The Magic Dragon," "Day Is Done," and "Light One Candle." This musical creativity has always gone hand-in-hand with Yarrow's commitment to social change. Many issues have moved Peter Yarrow to dedicate his time and talent over the years: hunger, homelessness, nuclear threat, education, equal rights and more. Among the many honors bestowed upon him, Yarrow is most proud of the Allard K. Lowenstein Award, which he received in 1982 for advancing the causes of human rights, peace and freedom.
Yarrow's most recent project utilizes music and video along with character education curricula to help establish safe, compassionate and nurturing environments for children in schools and summer camps across America. Launched in over 10,000 schools, Operation Respect: "Don't Laugh At Me" was hailed by virtually the entire educational community as a key initiative in our nation's response to the challenge of physical and emotional violence among children. Yarrow feels that this program, of which he is Founding Director, is perhaps the most important advocacy effort of his entire career.*
Though only in her twenties, Bethany Yarrow is no stranger to the circumstances of the struggle for human rights and self-determination. As early as her teenage years she joined her father in marches, demonstrations and election campaigns. A Summa Cum Laude graduate of Yale, Bethany has traveled widely and has seen firsthand the results of social, economic and political inequity around the world. In 1992, she received a university fellowship to travel to South Africa and make a documentary about the grassroots reality of apartheid. The film received critical acclaim and was selected for competition in twelve festivals internationally, including the Sundance, Bombay and Berlin Film Festivals.
Last year, Bethany released her debut CD, entitled “Rock Island”, to amazing (and amazed) reviews. In totally unexpected ways, Bethany took traditional slave lullabies, prison songs, and murder ballads, and turned them into grooving electronic pop for a new generation. Bethany has been dubbed a “musical medium”, crossing genres and time, and in re-inventing these deeply American songs, Bethany has not only taken them into the future, she has made them deeply her own.
In this joint presentation, Peter and Bethany bridge the generation gap with a program of songs and personal stories, which reflect their enormous regard for one another and shared commitment to making the world a better, more just place for everyone.
*Mr. Yarrow will discuss his Operation Respect curriculum in a workshop for educators on October 23 at 4:00 p.m.. Details to be announced soon.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007: RANDY COHEN

How To Be Good

Is it ever ethical -
• to download music from the web?
• to ignore your school's honor code?
• to hand in the same paper for two different classes?
Randy Cohen has taken up these moral dilemmas of university life, along with many off-campus queries in his New York Times column, "The Ethicist," syndicated in 38 papers across the US and Canada as "Everyday Ethics." In his talk, "How to Be Good," he lays out the approach he takes, and discusses those taken by other people, in sorting through the ethical quandries of ordinary experience. In addition, he recounts his unlikely history as an ethicist and makes a case that his background as a writer for David Letterman was excellent training for his current occupation. During the question and answer period following his remarks, he's happy to field ethical queries from the audience.
Randy Cohen was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He attended graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts as a music major studying composition. He is unable to account for either of these circumstances. His first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, Harpers, the Atlantic,Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for "Late Night With David Letterman," for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on Michael Moore”s "TV Nation." He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it. He was the original head writer on the "The Rosie O'Donnell Show."
Currently, he writes "The Ethicist," a weekly column for the New York Times Magazine that also appears in 38 papers in the U.S. and Canada. The Good, the Bad and the Difference, a book based upon his column, has recently been published by Doubleday.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007: STEPHEN DUBNER

Freakonomics

Stephen J. Dubner Stephen J. Dubner is the co-author of the international bestseller Freakonomics. Published in May 2005, Freakonomics instantly became a cultural phenomenon and has been on The New York Times Bestseller List for over one year! Dubner and his co-author, the University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, have appeared widely on television and are now regular contributors to ABC News, appearing monthly on Good Morning America and a segment of World News Tonight called Freakonomics Friday. They also write a monthly Freakonomics column in The New York Times Magazine and maintain a popular website, which has been called the most readable economics blog in the universe.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Dubner shows how economics is, at root, the study of incentives that is, how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. The art of Freakonomics is the art of challenging conventional wisdom, and showing that the modern world is in fact even more intriguing than we might think.

Dubner is an award-winning journalist who spent several years at the Times, and has also written for The New Yorker, Time and elsewhere. His journalism has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Crime Writing. He is the author of two previous best-selling books, Turbulent Souls and Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper, as well as a forthcoming children’s book.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007: DANIEL HANDLER, (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket)

An Evening with Daniel Handler

Lemony Snicket is the bestselling children's author in America. Lemony Snicket is the pen name of San Francisco novelist, musician, and screenwriter Daniel Handler. His twelve-part series, "A Series of Unfortunate Events," has sold over 27 million books worldwide. The books, starting with The Bad Beginning, feature the tragic and comic adventures of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, (the Baudelaire orphans) as they escape from their wicked guardian (Count Olaf) and a variety of other villains who seek to steal their fortune. The series is drawing to a close now in a thirteenth volume entitled, appropriately enough, The End, to be released on Friday, October 13, 2006.

The first three books were made into a hit movie called Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events starring Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep. Released in 2004, the film went on to gross over $200 million worldwide.

Daniel Handler originally came up with "Lemony Snicket" as a pseudonym to use rather than placing his real name on the mailing lists of several right-wing organizations he was researching for one of his novels, The Basic Eight. It became something of an in-joke with his friends, who were known to order pizzas under the name. When he found himself writing a series of children's books, he decided to use the Snicket name to add an air of mystery to proceedings; Lemony Snicket is an elusive figure. Handler has a considerable amount of fun with the Snicket character in the author biography sections of the books, in a page at the end of every book where Snicket makes complicated arrangements for the delivery of the manuscript of the next book to his publisher (in letters often ruined through the catastrophes in the next book), on the Lemony Snicket website and in Snicket's Unauthorized Autobiography (which Handler wrote the introduction to as himself). Bio courtesy of Matthew Jackson and Wikipedia.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007: DR. BERNARD KOUCHNER

Universal Health Care and the Third World

Dr. Bernard Kouchner Dr. Kouchner is the co-founder and former President of Nobel Prize-winning Doctors Without Borders, a Paris-based non-profit humanitarian organization made up of voluntary medical personnel who contribute their time and expertise in assisting in situations of emergency or inadequate medical care in the developing world. In that capacity he traveled extensively in troubled areas of the world. He organized humanitarian operations to Somalia, El Salvador, Lebanon and Vietnam. In addition to those countries, he led field operations in Cambodia, Thailand, Uruguay, Peru, Guatemala and Honduras.

The first person to challenge the Red Cross's stance of neutrality and silence in wars and massacres, Kouchner has played an important role in international humanitarian efforts for more than twenty years. As France's Minister of Health and Humanitarian affairs, he convinced the U.N. to accept "the right to interfere" resolution, and after devastating civil wars in the Balkans, served as Special Representative to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in Kosovo.

Today, Kouchner continues to promote universal access to medical care, and takes part in international efforts in the fight against AIDS. He brings to the podium his in-depth experience with public health, human rights and international political involvement to discuss global issues. He is currently the professor of public health at the Health and Development Department of the Conservatoire National des Arts Et Métiers (CNAM). . He is the recipient of several human rights awards, including the Dag Hammarskjold Prize and the Prix Europa.

Speakers By Year

Links