Together, participants will reflect on the deer hide and consider what it reveals about diplomacy, responsibility, and how agreements endure across generations.

n 1968, The Beatles, Nina Simone, and The Rolling Stones each reimagined revolution. The Beatles questioned violence; Simone demanded upheaval; the Stones captured irony and restlessness. Heard together, these songs reveal how art channels protest, struggle, and hope.

This Community Conversation takes its cue from a short, sharp excerpt from Plato’s Apology, which recounts the trial of Socrates in ancient Athens.

"Thinking We Are Free" begins from a quiet question: what if freedom is something we assume too easily or lose without noticing? This late-night conversation looks ahead, exploring how freedom is practiced rather than declared, and what it might take to keep it alive in an age of fragmentation.

How has market thinking reshaped how we understand meaning, value, and community? This conversation examines what happens when efficiency eclipses purpose—and how shared worth, beyond transaction, might be reclaimed.

Together, participants will read closely, listen carefully, and reflect on how ideals of equality have shaped American life, where they have fallen short, and why they remain central to democratic renewal today.

Ressentiment—deeper than resentment—arises when powerlessness turns frustration inward, breeding suspicion and grievance. This conversation explores how that mood shapes civic life today and how empathy, recognition, and shared truth might restore trust across a divided society.

This conversation asks how power, imagination, and conscience can resist decay—and how honesty and courage might renew a democracy grown weary of itself.

In 1968, The Beatles, Nina Simone, and The Rolling Stones each reimagined revolution. The Beatles questioned violence; Simone demanded upheaval; the Stones captured irony and restlessness. Heard together, these songs reveal how art channels protest, struggle, and hope.

In Politics and the English Language (1946), Orwell warns that vague, clichéd language erodes thought and allows power to manipulate. Clear speech, he argues, is an act of resistance and civic responsibility.

Langston Hughes’s I, Too envisions belonging through justice and recognition; Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese offers belonging through acceptance and kinship with life. Together, these poems explore resilience, hope, and the expansive idea of community.

HNY has hosted them more often in recent months, and a just-wrapped, supersized edition at the New York Public Library to coincide with Banned Books Week serves as an excellent illustration of Why and especially Why now?