92NY Talks

92NY Talks is built from public conversations held on the stage of the 92nd Street Y in New York. The constant is the venue, not a host. The interviewer changes with each guest: Gayle King with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, TCM's Alicia Malone with Michael Douglas, and Malcolm Gladwell with the authors Michael Lynton and Joshua Steiner. So the feed jumps between very different worlds. On politics, the talk is concrete. A conversation with Maggie Haberman, Alex Burns and Jeff Greenfield takes in a bleak midterm environment for Republicans, President Trump's dislike of candidates who keep their distance from him, and the SAVE Act, which one speaker says would make voting much harder. Shapiro's conversation is more personal. He talks about public service, Jewish values and his memoir Where We Keep the Light, and admits to guilt that a job he loves put his children's lives at risk. King keeps returning to the question of security, and he answers plainly that it was a failure. Literature gets its own evening. Kevin Young, the New Yorker's poetry editor, joins poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, writer Sasha Bonét and novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers to celebrate a new Toni Morrison collection, Language as Liberation. One panelist says Morrison must have been afraid to be the first, and recalls insisting that editors capitalize both Black and White. The evening closes with a call to 'spread the Morrison gospel.' The Gladwell conversation is about owning past mistakes, and it gets specific. Lynton, a former CEO of Sony Entertainment, recalls a breach that exposed everybody's email, and he calls the leak of his family's medical records a very dark moment. Film and television bring a lighter mood. Douglas remembers touring Drexel Burnham's offices while preparing Wall Street, where Oliver asked where the shredder was, and then goes off on a tangent about hair and his friend Pat Riley. At the Outlander farewell, moderated by Emily from The Wrap, the actor who plays young Ian calls his years on the series his college years, and the evening ends with a toast. Episodes often open by saying when the conversation was recorded at the Y. The tone runs from warm and teasing to grave, sometimes within a single evening. For anecdotes, start with Douglas. For something heavier, start with Shapiro.