adam gopnik | House of SpeakEasy NYC

Posts From Author: adam gopnik

Curtain Call: Inside the Lie

Seriously Entertaining is back! The first of our two shows this fall, Inside the Lie, hits City Winery on Monday, September 29, with a mind-expanding line-up of literary talent. Don’t have your tickets yet? Check out our writers below in an audiovisual preview of some of the pleasures that await you. Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist specializing in particle cosmology. He’s also one of the great elucidators. Gleiser’s work is remarkably accessible, cracking open the hardest nuts of quantum physics and cosmology for the general reader. Books include The Prophet and the Astronomer (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), which investigates the ongoing search for meaning in the stars, and, most recently, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2014). Read our review of The Island of Knowledge here, follow Marcelo on Twitter, and watch his Ted Talk on the origins of life here: John Guare‘s fifty-year career on the American stage and screen has been marked by some stunning highs, including the Tony Award-winning success of The House of Blue Leaves, Louis Malle’s classic 1980 movie Atlantic City, starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, and, more recently, A Free Man of Color (2010). Check out our survey of […]

Seriously Entertaining Gala Sets Social Pages Alight

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.” — Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice” (1923) So wrote Robert Frost in 1923, eerily prescient in his choice of imagery of this past Monday night. For inside the walls of City Winery NYC, as temperatures outside dipped into the low 20s, the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala night turned out to be a sizzling-hot celebration of writers and their art. For Page Six, the evening marked the coming-together of “a pride of literary lions”. For the House of SpeakEasy team, it marked the successful start of a series of Seriously Entertaining shows to come in the months ahead. Playing emcee for the night was comedian Andy Borowitz, creator of The Borowitz Report. In the words of Vogue: [The show] opened with writer and host Andy Borowitz regaling-slash-horrifying the legions of literary-minded folk in attendance with a tale of being asked to live-tweet the Oscars last year by an unnamed newspaper owned by “an Australian man” and turned the offer down once informed it was for no actual fee. “They said they would mention my website,” he dryly quipped. Borowitz’s elliptical anecdote laid bare one of the House of SpeakEasy’s […]

Plays with Matches: A Brief Meditation on Fire & Literature

This coming Monday, the House of SpeakEasy’s inaugural special guests — Andy Borowitz, Uma Thurman, Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, Simon Winchester and Dar Williams — will be stepping onto the stage at City Winery to ruminate on the theme “Plays with Matches”. I don’t know what they’re going to say. But it’s a fantastically potent theme — fiery metaphors abound in world literature, and fire has played a major role in the history of literature. So, in advance of gala night, I thought I’d share some of my own thoughts and a few excerpts from my reading notes. To start with, fire is of course the metaphor of choice for all kinds of passion, noble or ig-: “Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.” Venus attempting to sway the passions of Adonis in William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Humbert Humbert in the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Even when said passions turn out […]

Curtain Call: Meet Our Special Guests

It’s now just five days till our opening gala, “Plays with Matches”, and now seems a good time to bring all our hosts and special guests together. So, without further ado… Meet Andy Borowitz, our host, talking here about sex education and the difference between “continuously” and “continually” at the 92nd Street Y: “I guess I failed to ask a key follow-up question because I came away from this explanation thinking that all this transpired between a man and a woman while the couple was asleep. And it wasn’t until years later that I realised that one of you has to be awake…” Andy will be joined by Hollywood superstar Uma Thurman, who hosts our literary quiz, “The Tip of My Tongue”. Here’s Uma sharing a $5 milkshake with John Travolta in 1994’s Pulp Fiction. “I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna go to the bathroom and powder my nose. You sit here and think of something to say…” Storytelling collective The Moth has featured writer Adam Gopnik as a guest several times. Here he is in 2006 on how he learned to LOL. “…and I thought to myself, This is the real nature of every communication between parent and child: we send them […]

Susan Orlean Does Her Own Stunts

Over the last three weeks it’s been my pleasure to introduce you to the line-up for the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala: comedian and host Andy Borowitz; Hollywood superstar Uma Thurman, who will host literary quiz “The Tip of My Tongue”; writer Adam Gopnik; historian Simon Winchester; singer-songwriter Dar Williams; and finally, the author Susan Orlean. Susan Orlean hails from Ohio and is typically direct and witty in her assessment of the Buckeye State in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (ed. Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey; Ecco, 2008). “The flatness, it turns out, is a myth,” she begins, before going on to dispel other such preconceptions: The vast cornfields are also a myth […] The hard, nasal, cawing accent is mostly a myth, though now and again, as you roam through Ohio, you will certainly hear words shaped without any roundness or melody […] Even the Midwesternness of Ohio is a myth. She finds in the character of Ohio “a certain regularness, a lack of wild distinction, a muting of idiosyncratic extreme”, and feels the need to make it sound livelier. At summer camp as a child: I boasted that Sam Sheppard, the osteopath who murdered his wife in […]

Firestarters: Adam Gopnik on Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin

If, like me, you tend to want to know more than you can possibly read about, a sudden urge to learn about, say, Abraham Lincoln or Charles Darwin can be an occasion for despair. The literature on such seminal figures is vast and expanding, like an Everest that’s getting bigger. Or the universe. In short: intimidating. So to come across a book like Adam Gopnik‘s Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life is a bit like finding that the Himalayan authorities have installed a ski lift just for you. We’re super lucky to have Adam Gopnik joining us for the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala at City Winery NYC on January 27. A long-time New Yorker contributor and three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays, he has that forensic gift of the great essayist, the uncanny ability to see Aquarius where others see just stars. In Angels and Ages, recognising that his choice of subjects prohibits definitive coverage, he unspools his elegant premise from a single (but fertile) line of inquiry: the debate over what Edwin Stanton said at Lincoln’s deathbed. Stanton was Lincoln’s secretary of war and as close to the president as any man. It was natural that those […]

Five Minutes with Andy Borowitz

Happy new year, friends! Welcome to the first blog of 2014. Now the holidays are over, we’re all getting tremendously revved up ahead of the House of SpeakEasy’s opening gala at City Winery NYC on January 27! The theme for said gala is “Plays with Matches”, and we’re lucky enough to be joined by two amazing hosts to guide us through this fiery subject: comedian Andy Borowitz and Hollywood megastar Uma Thurman. In the weeks leading up to opening night, I’ll be introducing you to Andy and Uma as well as our special guests, Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, Dar Williams and Simon Winchester. I spoke to Andy Borowitz over the holidays to get his views on the year past and his hopes for the year ahead. Something of a comic polymath, Andy has to his name credits including TV’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (creator), 1998 movie Pleasantville (co-producer) and hit satirical website The Borowitz Report (founder). He is the primary host of The Moth, a storytelling platform launched in New York that has now gone nationwide and recently spawned a New York Times bestseller. Andy won an NAACP Image Award for The Fresh Prince and the inaugural National Press Club Award for Humor in 2004. You might have seen his face […]