Should your boyfriend save your beloved cat or a drowning stranger? Your stepdad has Alzheimer's and now your mom wants to date. Is this okay? Kwame Anthony Appiah, the author of The Ethicist column for the New York Times Magazine and 2024 winner of the Library’s John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, took on these and other quandries in a fun Live! At the Library event.
Bill Moyers, who died yesterday at the age of 91, was at the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium one night in the fall of 2023 to mark the preservation of more than 1,000 of his public television programs in The American Archive of Public Broadcasting. a collaboration between the Library and GBH, the public media production company in Boston. It was a crowning night to one of the most influential careers in American media.
U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón's final lecture last week in the Coolidge Auditorium was a love letter to poetry to libraries and librarians. Her lecture, titled “Against Breaking: On the Public and Private Power of Poetry,” framed poetry as a shared, not solitary, experience and as a celebration of humanity’s range of voices and perspectives.
Mac Barnett, the bestselling author of more than 60 children's books, including “Twenty Questions,” “Sam & Dave Dig a Hole,” “A Polar Bear in the Snow” as well as the “Mac B., Kid Spy” series, will be inaugurated today as the 2025-2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.