About the talk:

Crises have a way of revealing things. Who we are. What we value. Whose lives matter. In this talk, Eric Klinenberg draws on his new book, 2020, to shed light on what happened to New York City in a year when nothing was certain and everything was at stake. From school closures to essential workers, the movement for Black lives to the emergence of mutual aid networks, Klinenberg argues that 2020 changed us in ways we have not yet registered, and that its legacy shapes our lives and politics in 2024.

About the speaker:

Eric Klinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed (Knopf, 2012), Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown, 2018), Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), as well as the editor of Cultural Production in a Digital Age, co-editor of Antidemocracy in America (Columbia University Press, 2019), and co-author, with Aziz Ansari, of the New York Times #1 bestseller Modern Romance (The Penguin Press, 2015). His scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and This American Life.