What started off as a fairly small “occupation” has now gained international attention and spurred similar spontaneous proceedings in several parts of America. The protestors at Zuccotti park present the issue as 99% of people against 1% of people in society. Is this a new radical movement that promises to upend the contemporary consensus in mainstream politics? Is this a new dawn of a 1960’s style series of demonstrations? To what extent does the extensive media attention given to OWS reflect a sympathy more broadly in society for them? Is there a need for leadership in such situations?

The New York Salon invites you to a dinner, with international journalist Nathalie Rothschild, who recently reported from Israel on the “J14 tent” demonstrations and has written about OWS.

The wannabe tyrants of Wall Street: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11145

Please RSVP to alanvibe@aol.com or nysaloninfo@yahoo.com if you would like to attend and venue details will be released.

The NY Salon has partnered with The Battle of Ideas 2011, organizing this event in NYC in November as part of an international series of Satellite events that spans Europe, India and the US.

The next NY Salon event will be a discussion of New York Times columnist David Brooks’ new book: The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.

Monday May 9 2011, 7pm.
This is not a walk-in event. You must email jean@nysalon.org to attend. Spaces are limited so please let us know if you wish to attend and if you wish to bring a guest.

Brooks’ satirical novel explores the way we form our emotions and character. It chronicles the life cycle of a fictional couple—Harold, a historian working at a think tank, and Erica, a Chinese-Chicana cable-TV executive—as a case study of the non rational roots of social behaviors, from mating and shopping to voting. Through their story Brooks explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people. What is the best way to build true relationships? How do we instill imaginative thinking? How do we develop our moral intuitions and wisdom and character?

You can buy the book here (and yes, you must read the book!).

Happy New Year! The first NY Salon of 2011 will be a book discussion of Jonathan Franzen’s novel: Freedom: A Novel

Saturday January 29th 2011, 3pm
For more information and to attend, as spaces are limited, please contact: jean@nysalon.org

From the book cover: “In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom’s characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.”

You can buy the book here from Amazon: do make sure you read it before the salon!

Salon book discussion

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

Spaces are limited so please contact jean@nysalon.org if you wish to attend. Saturday, June 19 at 3pm

Get the Book

From Publishers Weekly, “This novel is set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Mississippi, where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan is just home from college in 1962, and, anxious to become a writer, is advised to hone her chops by writing about what disturbs her. The budding social activist begins to collect the stories of the black women on whom the country club sets relies and mistrusts enlisting the help of Aibileen, a maid who’s raised 17 children, and Aibileen’s best friend Minny, who’s found herself unemployed more than a few times after mouthing off to her white employers.”