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6:30 pm
Brooklyn Public Library
Brooklyn NY
February 13, 2024
Join us for a deep dive into the profound ways that the year 2020 saw our world shift, at the launch of the new book 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed. Written by Eric Klinenberg, sociologist and director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, 2020 is the first book to explore what the pandemic, the BLM protests, and the polarized and contested election reveal about our culture, society, and future. WIth the traumas of that year still reverberating, this pivotal thinker helps provide perspective on our reshaped lives, country, and world. Klinenberg will be in conversation with novelist Nell Freudenberger, whose upcoming work The Limits (released April 2024) also grapples with this seismic year.
More6:30 pm
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
New York, NY
March 4, 2024
6:30 pm
McNally Jackson Seaport
New York, NY
February 15, 2024
2020 will go down alongside 1914, 1929, and 1968 as one of the most consequential years in history. This riveting and affecting book is the first attempt to capture the full human experience of that fateful time.
At the heart of 2020 are seven vivid profiles of ordinary New Yorkers—including an elementary school principal, a bar manager, a subway custodian, and a local political aide—whose experiences illuminate how Americans, and people across the globe, reckoned with 2020. Through these poignant stories, we revisit our own moments of hope and fear, the profound tragedies and losses in our communities, the mutual aid networks that brought us together, and the social movements that hinted at the possibilities of a better world.
Eric Klinenberg vividly captures these stories, casting them against the backdrop of a high-stakes presidential election, a surge of misinformation, rising distrust, and raging protests. We move from the epicenter in New York City to Washington and London, where political leaders made the crisis so much more lethal than it had to be. We bear witness to epidemiological battles in Wuhan and Beijing, along with the initiatives of scientists, citizens, and policy makers in Australia, Japan, and Taiwan, who worked together to save lives.
Klinenberg allows us to see 2020—and, ultimately, ourselves—with unprecedented clarity and empathy. His book not only helps us reckon with what we lived through, but also with the challenges we face before the next crisis arrives.
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