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A panel on how to survive and thrive as a feminist in a troubled political climate, featuring (from left to right) Nona Willis Aronowitz, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, and Jill Filipovic. Jill Filipovic’s new book is “The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness.”
Women have come out in force to protest the Trump administration’s encroachments on women’s rights and human rights at home and abroad. But to successfully oppose Trump, feminists also need to counter his “America First” narrative with one of their own—one that says all human beings are entitled to happiness. What does the feminist pursuit of happiness look like in dark, reactionary times? Three panelists attempt to answer that question.
Jill Filipovic is a journalist and attorney based in Nairobi and New York City. Her new book “The H-Spot” explores how American women exercise their right to “the pursuit of happiness” in light of social expectations and systemic inequalities.
Nona Willis Aronowitz is a writer, editor, author, and features editor at Fusion. She has been a contributing writer for the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Matter, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Playboy, The Nation, and Rookie, among many others.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay is the Senior Editorial Director of Culture and Identities at Mic and author of “Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life.” 
Anna Feigenbaum, author of “Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today,” in conversation with L.A. Kauffman, Mark Bray, Ali Issa, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary. At Verso Books in Brooklyn, November 8, 2017.
How has tear gas gone from the battlefields of WWI to the most commonly used form of “less-lethal” police force? How can activists today learn from the history of chemical weapons used to suppress political dissent and labor strikes? How might we build campaigns against the profiting off protest? Join a panel of writers, scholars and activists who will discuss their work and personal experiences organizing in the face of state repression.
This discussion will commemorate the launch of Anna Feigenbaum’s new book, “Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today.” An engrossing century-spanning narrative, “Tear Gas” is the first history of this weapon, and takes us from military labs and chemical weapons expos to union assemblies and protest camps, drawing on declassified reports and witness testimonies to show how policing with poison came to be.
Co-sponsored by Melville House and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Award-winning poet Danez Smith is celebrated for deft lines, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police—suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten, replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith writes about desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood—and an HIV-positive diagnosis. Smith confronts, praises, and rebukes America, where every day is too often a funeral and too rarely a miracle. University of Chicago sociologist, poet, artist, and educator Eve L. Ewing joins Danez in conversation.
This program is presented in partnership with Gallery Guichard and the Poetry Foundation. Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times contributing op-ed writer, joins fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen for a deep dive into this moment of extraordinary transition in American journalism.
Just a few years ago, writes Greenhouse in her new book, Just a Journalist, the mainstream press was wrestling with whether labeling waterboarding as torture violated important norms of neutrality and objectivity. Now, major American newspapers regularly call the president of the United States a liar. Clearly, something has changed as the old rules of “balance” and “two sides to every story” have lost their grip. Is the change for the better? Will it last?
For decades, Linda Greenhouse covered the US Supreme Court for The New York Times. Get her perspective on these issues and more, as she and Quindlen explore questions about the role journalists can and should play as citizens, even as participants, in the world around them.
Recorded on November 15, 2017 at the 92nd Street Y. 
Rob Smith is a gay Iraq war veteran, journalist, and author of "Confessions of a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Soldier: How a Black, Gay Man Survived the Infantry, Coming Out, and the War in Iraq".
More info about "Confessions of a 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Soldier":
Rob is a young black man coming to terms with his sexuality amid the backdrop of a sometimes homophobic and hyper-masculine U.S. Army. After surviving the notoriously brutal Infantry basic training, and simultaneously remaining closeted to all but a few of his colleagues at his first duty station, he is thrown into dangerous territory when the United States declares war on Iraq and his unit is one of the first called in. Deftly navigating the intersections of race, sexuality, and public policy, "Confessions of a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Soldier" is alternately thought-provoking, humorous, and harrowing. Rob's experience offers a ground-level view of life on the front lines of race and sexuality in the United States military, in an unforgettable gay coming-of-age story — with a military twist. A reading by the Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets: Elizabeth Alexander, Toi Derricotte, Forrest Gander, Linda Gregerson, Terrance Hayes, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Khaled Mattawa, Marilyn Nelson, Alicia Ostriker, Claudia Rankine, Alberto Ríos, David St. John and Arthur Sze. With an introduction by Jen Benka, executive director of the Academy of American Poets. Recorded on October 4, 2017.
