Saturday 9:30am - Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark with Bill Goldstein

Kai Bird, a self-described biographer of the American establishment who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on Robert Oppenheimer, was as surprised as anyone to be writing about Roy Cohn, the right-wing lawyer whose notorious career saw him serve as consigliere to Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump. "I had somehow underestimated his significance," Bird writes in American Scoundrel, the new Cohn biography he wrote with his wife, Susan Goldmark. It was only after Trump ascended to the highest office that Bird started paying closer attention. In this conversation, Bird and Goldmark will discuss the legacy of a man whose personal immorality planted the seeds of America's descent with cultural historian Bill Goldstein, whose forthcoming biography is of Larry Kramer, the activist playwright whose life's work (he is best known for The Normal Heart) stands in radical opposition to Cohn's. As Goldstein wrote when Kramer died in 2020, he fought back and believed so much in love.

Saturday 10:45am - Carol Gilligan and Niobe Way

The publication of Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982) catalyzed a feminist revolution in the field of psychology. In her paradigm-shifting work, she formulated an ethics of care -- a different voice that joins reason with emotion, mind with body, and self with relationships. "I didn't go to Harvard to study with Gilligan," fellow psychologist Niobe Way wrote in a recent article, "but I soon found myself drawn to her work because it challenged everything I thought I knew about human nature." In this conversation, which builds on nearly forty years of mentoring, friendship, and collaboration, Gilligan and Way will discuss the intersections and influence of their respective projects. Way has done for boys what Gilligan has done for girls, Elise Loehnen has written. "While Gilligan shows that girls come to not know what they know, Way traces how boys disconnect from caring and enter a period of loneliness. I often cite Way and Gilligan together, specifically the insight around when the word don't enters a child's vocabulary. How do we repair our culture so that it's safe for everyone to stay connected?"

Saturday 12:00pm - Laura Buchwald and special guest

The supernatural has a way of sounding sublime in the sparkling words of Laura Buchwald, wrote Hannah Bos (co-creator of HBO's Somebody Somewhere). The fact that the protagonist of her novels The Coat Check Girl and The Book of Reservations has friends on both sides of the veil reflects Buchwald's abiding interest in the difficult and surprising process of grieving, how it shapes and refines us. For what promises to be an extraordinary conversation, Buchwald will interview renowned psychic medium.

Saturday 2:00pm - Annette Gordon-Reed and Brent Staples

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

This is the Declaration of Independence's most inspiring passage, historian Annette Gordon-Reed wrote recently in the New York Times upon the occasion of the nation's 250th birthday. "But when Thomas Jefferson wrote these words, racially based chattel slavery existed in all 13 American colonies, including at Monticello. Beautiful as it was, Jefferson's language opened a gap between the idealism of the country's founding document and reality as it existed in what would become the new republic."

In a wide-ranging conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist Brent Staples, Gordon-Reed will reflect on this gap across American history and into our current political moment. "The story of race and racism in the United States is obscured by layer upon layer of willful forgetting," Staples has written. "Writing about this problem is by definition a forensic act."

Saturday 3:15pm - Saidiya Hartman and Jamaica Kincaid in conversation with Farah Jasmine Griffin

What are the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardening? How does the garden, as a patchwork site of memory and meaning, nurture and reflect a literary life? What can the garden teach us about communal living, radical care, and conquest? In this intimate conversation, two of our most acclaimed and singular writers, scholar/playwright Saidiya Hartman and novelist/essayist Jamaica Kincaid give the audience a rare look at the beautiful experiments that are their own home gardens. For Kincaid, the origins of her gardening life can be traced to her second Mother's Day, when she was gifted seeds and tools. "I seemed to have been overtaken by my own childhood in Antigua and the spirit of my mother," Kincaid has written. "I went back to her, I suppose, and from there, because of the way I am, I became interested in the origins of the flowers I was growing. My favorite subjects have always been botany, history, and geography, and plants contain those three things. For Hartman, an avid gardener who lives part time in the Berkshires, she links the garden with a sense of joy. I tend to describe joy as this release from the constraint or costume of the individual - a sense of the self disappearing in the vastness of the earth, the ocean, the sky, the land, she has written. I love the colors in my garden. I love just playing with the colors."

Saturday 4:30pm - Colm Toibin and Adam Moss: A live Work-of-Art interview

What makes an artist? How do artists think? Where do they begin, what do they do next, and when do they know they are finished? What do they do when they lose faith? Do they lose faith?

Adam Moss, legendary editor of New York magazine, investigates these questions in The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. "Here are," Moss writes in the book's introduction, "forty conversations in which I ask artists to walk me through the evolution of a novel, a painting, a photograph, a movie, a joke, a song, and to supply physical documentation of their process as a map of their thinking." At field, Moss will conduct a live Work of Art interview with beloved novelist Colm Toibin. "Writing, for me, is a way of pulling things up and out -- guts. Things that have not been spilt before," Toibin has written. "It depends on memory, on imagination. It depends on things that are very difficult."

Sunday 9:30am - Jonathan Alter: America at a Turning Point

What can history tell us about where American politics is headed? Journalist and historian Jonathan Alter brings his sharp eye to the forces shaping the country -- and the road to the midterm elections. The author of acclaimed books on FDR, Obama, Carter, and Trump, Alter offers a wide-ranging perspective on America's political moment. Alter will be joined on stage by a surprise special guest, to be announced, for a deep-dive conversation about the forces shaping American politics today.

Sunday 10:45am - Ezekiel Emanuel and Tony Coles with Vardit Ravitsky

How do we ensure that scientific innovation leads to safe, equitable care? In the discovery and development of cutting-edge medical treatments, what is the right balance of human clinical insight and a transformative technology like A.I.? Where do best practices and politics meet in the structural reform of the healthcare system? What is the connection between the health of our communities and the health of our democracy? Ezekiel Emanuel and Tony Coles, friends and former classmates who are now prominent leaders in bioethics, public policy, and biotech, come to field to discuss some of the most urgent public-health issues facing us today. Their conversation is moderated by bioethicist Vardit Ravitsky, President and CEO of the Hastings Center -- a nonpartisan research institute that strives "to promote collaborative exchanges that foster an inclusive, intellectually rich, and well-informed discourse, and for these exchanges to help patients and families, healthcare systems, the scientific community, and society at large." 

Sunday 1:00pm - Tom Hammick

Internationally celebrated as a visionary artist, the British painter and printmaker Tom Hammick is first and foremost a storyteller. In a special presentation created just for the field festival, illustrated by images from his recent work as well as the music and poetry that have inspired it, Hammick offers the audience a rare glimpse of his creative practice and lifelong pursuit of art-making that celebrates love and loss while exploring his deeply personal version of what it is like to be "a human alive on the edge of this planet, spinning in space." As he said in a recent interview, "I don't always know what's going to happen, but I have a very strong image in my head, I have a sort of taste in my mouth, and a feeling, a very strong feeling. The picture has got to try and stand up to that."

Sunday 2:15pm - Bessel van der Kolk and Ronald D. Siegel

"We are on the verge of becoming a trauma-conscious society," writes Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score, his internationally bestselling magnum opus. "Almost every day one of my colleagues publishes a report on how trauma disrupts the workings of mind, brain, and body. This understanding opens the door to an array of interventions, but the challenge of trauma treatment is in not only dealing with the past. We must help our patients to live fully and securely in the present." In this conversation with longtime friend and fellow psychiatrist Ronald D. Siegel, van der Kolk -- whose deeply influential work has been credited with combining the curiosity of the scientist with the erudition of the scholar and the passion of the truth teller -- discusses the latest findings around the use of psychedelics as an effective trauma treatment. As Siegel has written, "psychotherapists since Freud have worked with non-ordinary states to better understand and heal the heart and mind. What can we clinicians learn from the use of psychedelics in the treatment of PTSD, depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety? What can they teach us about the neurobiology of human suffering and human flourishing?"

Saturday 9:30am - Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark with Bill Goldstein

Kai Bird, a self-described biographer of the American establishment who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on Robert Oppenheimer, was as surprised as anyone to be writing about Roy Cohn, the right-wing lawyer whose notorious career saw him serve as consigliere to Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump. "I had somehow underestimated his significance," Bird writes in American Scoundrel, the new Cohn biography he wrote with his wife, Susan Goldmark. It was only after Trump ascended to the highest office that Bird started paying closer attention. In this conversation, Bird and Goldmark will discuss the legacy of a man whose personal immorality planted the seeds of America's descent with cultural historian Bill Goldstein, whose forthcoming biography is of Larry Kramer, the activist playwright whose life's work (he is best known for The Normal Heart) stands in radical opposition to Cohn's. As Goldstein wrote when Kramer died in 2020, he fought back and believed so much in love.

Saturday 10:45am - Carol Gilligan and Niobe Way

The publication of Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982) catalyzed a feminist revolution in the field of psychology. In her paradigm-shifting work, she formulated an ethics of care -- a different voice that joins reason with emotion, mind with body, and self with relationships. "I didn't go to Harvard to study with Gilligan," fellow psychologist Niobe Way wrote in a recent article, "but I soon found myself drawn to her work because it challenged everything I thought I knew about human nature." In this conversation, which builds on nearly forty years of mentoring, friendship, and collaboration, Gilligan and Way will discuss the intersections and influence of their respective projects. Way has done for boys what Gilligan has done for girls, Elise Loehnen has written. "While Gilligan shows that girls come to not know what they know, Way traces how boys disconnect from caring and enter a period of loneliness. I often cite Way and Gilligan together, specifically the insight around when the word don't enters a child's vocabulary. How do we repair our culture so that it's safe for everyone to stay connected?"

Saturday 12:00pm - Laura Buchwald and special guest

The supernatural has a way of sounding sublime in the sparkling words of Laura Buchwald, wrote Hannah Bos (co-creator of HBO's Somebody Somewhere). The fact that the protagonist of her novels The Coat Check Girl and The Book of Reservations has friends on both sides of the veil reflects Buchwald's abiding interest in the difficult and surprising process of grieving, how it shapes and refines us. For what promises to be an extraordinary conversation, Buchwald will interview renowned psychic medium.

Saturday 2:00pm - Annette Gordon-Reed and Brent Staples

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

This is the Declaration of Independence's most inspiring passage, historian Annette Gordon-Reed wrote recently in the New York Times upon the occasion of the nation's 250th birthday. "But when Thomas Jefferson wrote these words, racially based chattel slavery existed in all 13 American colonies, including at Monticello. Beautiful as it was, Jefferson's language opened a gap between the idealism of the country's founding document and reality as it existed in what would become the new republic."

In a wide-ranging conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist Brent Staples, Gordon-Reed will reflect on this gap across American history and into our current political moment. "The story of race and racism in the United States is obscured by layer upon layer of willful forgetting," Staples has written. "Writing about this problem is by definition a forensic act."

Saturday 3:15pm - Saidiya Hartman and Jamaica Kincaid in conversation with Farah Jasmine Griffin

What are the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardening? How does the garden, as a patchwork site of memory and meaning, nurture and reflect a literary life? What can the garden teach us about communal living, radical care, and conquest? In this intimate conversation, two of our most acclaimed and singular writers, scholar/playwright Saidiya Hartman and novelist/essayist Jamaica Kincaid give the audience a rare look at the beautiful experiments that are their own home gardens. For Kincaid, the origins of her gardening life can be traced to her second Mother's Day, when she was gifted seeds and tools. "I seemed to have been overtaken by my own childhood in Antigua and the spirit of my mother," Kincaid has written. "I went back to her, I suppose, and from there, because of the way I am, I became interested in the origins of the flowers I was growing. My favorite subjects have always been botany, history, and geography, and plants contain those three things. For Hartman, an avid gardener who lives part time in the Berkshires, she links the garden with a sense of joy. I tend to describe joy as this release from the constraint or costume of the individual - a sense of the self disappearing in the vastness of the earth, the ocean, the sky, the land, she has written. I love the colors in my garden. I love just playing with the colors."

Saturday 4:30pm - Colm Toibin and Adam Moss: A live Work-of-Art interview

What makes an artist? How do artists think? Where do they begin, what do they do next, and when do they know they are finished? What do they do when they lose faith? Do they lose faith?

Adam Moss, legendary editor of New York magazine, investigates these questions in The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. "Here are," Moss writes in the book's introduction, "forty conversations in which I ask artists to walk me through the evolution of a novel, a painting, a photograph, a movie, a joke, a song, and to supply physical documentation of their process as a map of their thinking." At field, Moss will conduct a live Work of Art interview with beloved novelist Colm Toibin. "Writing, for me, is a way of pulling things up and out -- guts. Things that have not been spilt before," Toibin has written. "It depends on memory, on imagination. It depends on things that are very difficult."

Sunday 9:30am - Jonathan Alter: America at a Turning Point

What can history tell us about where American politics is headed? Journalist and historian Jonathan Alter brings his sharp eye to the forces shaping the country -- and the road to the midterm elections. The author of acclaimed books on FDR, Obama, Carter, and Trump, Alter offers a wide-ranging perspective on America's political moment. Alter will be joined on stage by a surprise special guest, to be announced, for a deep-dive conversation about the forces shaping American politics today.

Sunday 10:45am - Ezekiel Emanuel and Tony Coles with Vardit Ravitsky

How do we ensure that scientific innovation leads to safe, equitable care? In the discovery and development of cutting-edge medical treatments, what is the right balance of human clinical insight and a transformative technology like A.I.? Where do best practices and politics meet in the structural reform of the healthcare system? What is the connection between the health of our communities and the health of our democracy? Ezekiel Emanuel and Tony Coles, friends and former classmates who are now prominent leaders in bioethics, public policy, and biotech, come to field to discuss some of the most urgent public-health issues facing us today. Their conversation is moderated by bioethicist Vardit Ravitsky, President and CEO of the Hastings Center -- a nonpartisan research institute that strives "to promote collaborative exchanges that foster an inclusive, intellectually rich, and well-informed discourse, and for these exchanges to help patients and families, healthcare systems, the scientific community, and society at large." 

Sunday 1:00pm - Tom Hammick

Internationally celebrated as a visionary artist, the British painter and printmaker Tom Hammick is first and foremost a storyteller. In a special presentation created just for the field festival, illustrated by images from his recent work as well as the music and poetry that have inspired it, Hammick offers the audience a rare glimpse of his creative practice and lifelong pursuit of art-making that celebrates love and loss while exploring his deeply personal version of what it is like to be "a human alive on the edge of this planet, spinning in space." As he said in a recent interview, "I don't always know what's going to happen, but I have a very strong image in my head, I have a sort of taste in my mouth, and a feeling, a very strong feeling. The picture has got to try and stand up to that."

Sunday 2:15pm - Bessel van der Kolk and Ronald D. Siegel

"We are on the verge of becoming a trauma-conscious society," writes Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score, his internationally bestselling magnum opus. "Almost every day one of my colleagues publishes a report on how trauma disrupts the workings of mind, brain, and body. This understanding opens the door to an array of interventions, but the challenge of trauma treatment is in not only dealing with the past. We must help our patients to live fully and securely in the present." In this conversation with longtime friend and fellow psychiatrist Ronald D. Siegel, van der Kolk -- whose deeply influential work has been credited with combining the curiosity of the scientist with the erudition of the scholar and the passion of the truth teller -- discusses the latest findings around the use of psychedelics as an effective trauma treatment. As Siegel has written, "psychotherapists since Freud have worked with non-ordinary states to better understand and heal the heart and mind. What can we clinicians learn from the use of psychedelics in the treatment of PTSD, depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety? What can they teach us about the neurobiology of human suffering and human flourishing?"