Political Roundtable with The New York Review of Books

As the 2020 election swings into view, contributors to The New York Review of Books examine and debate our moment of political division and crisis.

Featuring

• Jamelle Bouie, opinion columnist, The New York Times


• Pamela Karlan, co-director, Stanford University Supreme Court Litigation Clinic


• Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities, Columbia University


• Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University


• Brenda Wineapple, writer, literary critic, and essayist

The 2020 general election takes place in a moment of anxiety arguably unlike any since the years immediately preceding the Civil War. A cluster of crises—epidemiological, financial, racial, and electoral—has shown us a nation whose politics seem polarized beyond repair.

Commentators and contributors to The New York Review of Books examine the nature of these grave challenges to our political structures and speculate about how they might be met.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
 Pamela Karlan is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford, where she also co-directs the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. Karlan's scholarship focuses on constitutional issues. In addition to dozens of scholarly articles, she is the co-author of three leading casebooks and a short introduction to constitutional interpretation—Keeping Faith with the Constitution. Karlan has also served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, a commisioner on California's Fair Political Practices Commission, and a Deupty Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice. Prior to entering the academy, she was an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In 2016, Karlan was named one of the Politico 50—a group of "thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics." 

 Mark Lilla was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. After holding professorships at New York University and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he joined Columbia University in 2007 as Professor Humanities. He has been awarded fellowships by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institut d'études avancées (Paris), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the American Academy in Rome. In 1995 he was inducted into the French Order of the Academic Palms. Lilla is a frequent contributor of The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and publications worldwide. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lectures widely and has delivered the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in Israel and the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University. In 2015, Overseas Press Club of America awarded him its prize for Best Commentary on International News in Any Medium. His books include The Reckless Mind, The Shipwrecked Mind, and most recently, The Once and Future Liberal. 

 Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His eight chief books are Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1998); The Reconstruction of Nations:Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (2008); Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Tony Judt, 2012); Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018); and Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020). Snyder's work has appeared in forty languages and has received a number of prizes, including the Emerson Prize in Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Vaclav Havel Foundation prize, the Foundation for Polish Science prize in the social sciences, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, the Dutch Auschwitz Committee award, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. Snyder was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, has received the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships, and holds state orders from Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. 

 Brenda Wineapple is the author of several acclaimed works of nonfiction, most recently The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, named one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2019 by Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times as well as one of the best books by NPR, Publishers Weekly, and The New York TimesBook Review. Wineapple is also the author of Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848 - 1877 and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wineapple has received a Literature Award from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship; a Pushcart Prize, two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities; and most recently, an NEH Public Scholars Award. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians, she regularly contributes to publications including The New York Times Book Review,The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal and The Nation. 

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Mark Lilla © Christophe Dellory

Brenda Wineapple © Elena Seibert