Roundtable

An Evening with New Yorker
Favorite Adam Gopnik and
Journal Columnist Alison Gopnik 

Wednesday, September 14
8:00 PM

We’re delighted that Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker favorite who has graced our libraries with such classics as Paris to the Moon and Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin and Lincoln, will be back at the Club to help us launch our 2016-17 season. And we’re pleased that this time he’ll be joined by his older sister, Alison Gopnik, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley whose work links psychology with philosophy. An internationally recognized leader in the study of children’s learning and development, Ms. Gopnik writes the “Mind and Matter” column for The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of a highly regarded volume on The Philosophical Baby and the co-author of a related study of The Scientist in the Crib. She and her brother will focus on the implications of her latest publication, The Gardener and the Carpenter, a book about what research tells us about the ideal relationship between parents and children. According to Ms. Gopnik, we now know that for infants as well as for mature adults, “play lets us explore alternatives, whether they are alternative ways of acting, thinking, or imagining.” She goes on to remind us that innovative corporations such as Google and Pixar have demonstrated that “open-ended curiosity” fosters creativity in ways that are just as beneficial for business and political leaders as they are for painters, philosophers, and playwrights. Cultivating imaginative thinking is a topic that Adam Gopnik has explored in all of his writing, and a theme that is particularly significant in The Table Comes First: France, Family, and the Meaning of Food. We hope you’ll join us for what promises to be another memorable and stimulating evening.