For more details and tickets, please visit the Summer Institute’s website.
Activist lawyer, former investigator at Human Rights Watch and now President of the Open Society Foundations (founded by George Soros), Binaifer Nowrojee, will address their mission as the world’s largest private funder to protect human rights. She will focus on the challenges to the future of human rights in the face of rising authoritarianism, laws to stifle NGOs and a free press, and, most recently, intense political pressures.
Political Substack host/interviewer/journalist/podcaster and former CNN White House Correspondent John Harwood in conversation with tenacious and fearless Miami Herald investigative reporter, Julie K. Brown, who broke the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking story, winner of two George Polk Awards for Justice Reporting, who pursues the story to this day.
New York Times Foreign Affairs Opinion columnist, Thomas Friedman – insightful, candid, often controversial, always thought-inspiring, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and book author who will share his observations on globalization, Middle East politics, American politics, wars, and the state of the world…which will change enormously between now and the evening of his talk.
Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson addresses the state of national and international security (and insecurity) in today’s fragile world. In addition, as Co-chair of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University, the unprecedented challenges and threats facing our leading universities.
Social commentator/culture observer Van Jones, political analyst, lawyer, civil rights advocate, bestselling author, CNN host (Crossfire, Messy Truth, The Redemption Project), President Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, visiting fellow at Princeton University, founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change, and the Dream Corps, social justice accelerator, and more – takes on the daunting topic of growing anti-semitism, and the intersection of Jewish and Black bias in America.
The New York Times Puzzle-Makers: Joel Fagliano, who interned with Times crossword puzzle editor (and folk hero), Will Shortz, and is now the lead puzzle editor and creates the Mini-Puzzle (5×5), with Wyna Liu, who went with her mother, on a 7-night Times “crossword cruise,” and met Joel, who inspired her to create her own puzzles, and today creates/edits Connections (words connected by shared but sometimes obscure themes), and Sam Ezersky,another Shortz mentee, who convinced Will to talk puzzles at his house one evening, and now creates/edits Spelling Bee (how many words you can spell with 7 letters). They’ll explain how they do what they do, why games have taken us by storm, and even how to get better at them.
