Yuppies may have been a classic 1980s stereotype, but they were also a very real demographic: a wave of hundreds of thousands of highly educated young professionals that washed over New York during that decade. As Wall Street moved to the center of American life, it drew a generation of young people into its vortex. For the first time, banks recruited roughly one-third of graduating classes from top universities. America’s economy had a new main character. Young bankers extracted profits from waning industries, shattering the foundations on which stable middle-class employment had long rested. Yuppie lawyers devised deals and tax strategies that eroded workers’ power and wages. As consumers, yuppies created new cultures of fitness and of excess, popularizing marathon running and fine dining as status markers. As city-dwellers, they were pioneers of gentrification. And as voters and political donors, yuppies engineered a takeover of local and national government, using their wealth to back candidates who would remake the country in their image. Yuppies reminds us that we still live in the shadow of the greed-is-good 1980s: Our cities are playgrounds for the wealthy, and Wall Street and Washington remain locked in a tight embrace. Dylan Gottlieb’s exquisite recounting leaves no doubt that the yuppie takeover of New York began a more unequal chapter in American life—one we continue writing today.

About the Speaker

Frinde Maher is Professor Emerita of Education and Women’s Studies at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she taught for twenty-seven years. A scholar of higher education, she is the co-author, with Mary Kay Tetreault, of several books, including The Feminist Classroom (1994) and Privilege and Diversity in the Academy (2007), as well as many articles. She has two children and four grandchildren, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In her graceful, aptly titled memoir, Class Encounters, Frinde Maher traces her journey away from her privileged origins on Boston’s North Shore. She takes us through Radcliffe and Oxford into community organizing, anti-Vietnam War activism, factory work and membership in the Maoist-leaning communist Progressive Labor Party, before becoming a high school teacher in South Boston and later a college professor. Maher captures the stresses, nuances, complex choices and serendipities of navigating different social worlds that, themselves, were being shaken by the multiple revolts of the 1960s. Being members of Students for a Democratic Society wasn’t radical enough—when her father’s first cousin David Rockefeller attended her wedding to John Maher, himself a Harvard-educated anti-war organizer, John had already been challenged by Rockefeller’s daughter for not more openly supporting the Viet Cong. America has long underplayed social class, while amplifying it in practice. Scholars, novelists and memoirists— Baltzell, Marquand, C. Wright Mills and Maher’s own brother Nelson Aldrich included—have explored the fault lines of high WASP culture and its now faded hegemony. Most observers have been men. Maher adds gender to the mix, along with attempts to cross the same class lines the other authors delineate. She explores her emerging voice and agency as she moves into the wider world to craft her own life—a life of change, self-discovery and continuity. She reminds us how central “class encounters” are to the American experience, a national strength when honestly embraced. This book is a timely reminder.

About the Speaker

Frinde Maher is Professor Emerita of Education and Women’s Studies at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she taught for twenty-seven years. A scholar of higher education, she is the co-author, with Mary Kay Tetreault, of several books, including The Feminist Classroom (1994) and Privilege and Diversity in the Academy (2007), as well as many articles. She has two children and four grandchildren, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He wrote the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation. Wilson believed that the people are the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, and fought unsuccessfully for a direct vote for the president and the Senate. Appointed as a justice to the first Supreme Court, he was later brought down by reckless land speculation and died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors. Instead of being remembered as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and impact of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.

About the Speaker

Jesse Wegman is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he works with the Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Future of the Constitution Advisory Committee. From 2013 through 2025, Wegman was a member of the New York Times editorial board, writing more than 1,000 editorials and signed pieces on law and politics, the Supreme Court, democracy, and the rule of law. His work was part of a package that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2018. Wegman is the author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College (St. Martin’s Press, 2020) and The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon Books, 2026), the first full-length biography in more than 70 years of the most democratic of all the American founders.

Danielle Allen is a political philosopher at Harvard University, where she is the James Bryant Conant University Professor and directs the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her many books on democracy and American political life include Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, Justice by Means of Democracy, and, most recently, Radical Duke, the story of Charles Lennox, an eighteenth-century aristocrat turned democratic reformer. A leading voice in the movement to renovate American democracy, she chairs the board of FairVote and is the convening chair for the Coalition for Healthy Democracy, which is leading a November 2026 ballot initiative for all-party primaries here in Massachusetts.

Natalie Lemle’s debut novel offers an insider’s view into the world of stolen artifacts and the hidden networks that link museums to organized crime, when a woman is forced to remember the summer she spent on an archaeological dig in Italy, as everyone she knew then may now be in danger. Successful trusts and estates attorney Lena Connolly is asked by a colleague to assist on a case: the Italian government claims an artifact was looted and sold to a museum illegally and is seeking repatriation. The object in question is a cup made of dichroic glass, which would have been rare even in Ancient Rome, let alone thousands of years later. Lena has done everything she can to put the study abroad summer she spent on an archaeological dig in the Italian Alps behind her. Her dreams of being an archaeologist shattered when her mentor Cyrille disappeared and her enigmatic boyfriend Giamma went dark, but with this new case, the past comes roaring back. Told in alternating timelines, Artifacts follows young Lena as she falls in love with both archaeology and Giamma on the streets of Torino while her adult self pieces together what truly happened on the dig, now a fully restored Roman villa with World Heritage status. The dichroic cup, Lena discovers, may have been taken from the very site she helped unearth. Powerful and exuberant, Natalie Lemle’s Artifacts brings readers behind the museum glass and asks questions about cultural heritage and the historical preservation of our shared sense of humanity.

About the Speaker

Natalie Lemle studied classics and art history at Tufts University and earned an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She is the founder of art_works, an art advisory connecting contemporary artists with global companies, and previously worked in corporate relations at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She serves on the boards of the ICA/Boston and the Associates of the Boston Public Library. Artifacts is her first novel.

Christopher C. Gorham is a lawyer, educator, and acclaimed author whose books include Matisse at War and the Goodreads Choice Award finalist, The Confidante. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, literary events, colleges, and book club gatherings.

Uncover the little-known story of Gouverneur Morris, the brilliant yet overlooked Founding Father whose visionary ideas from writing key components of the US Constitution to helping create America’s first bank to holding an unwavering stance against slavery shaped the nation’s future.

When George Washington and the Continental Army faced starvation, he turned to Gouverneur Morris to help devise a plan to provision the troops. When the fledgling nation needed a financial system to sustain the Revolution, Morris again was called upon to help design its first national bank and currency. When the compromises between North and South, large states and small, had to be stitched into a single governing document, the task of shaping the Constitution’s final language fell largely to him. At the Constitutional Convention, Morris spoke more often than any delegate save James Madison—and more forcefully against slavery. When Alexander Hamilton died in a tragic duel, his widow insisted that Hamilton’s closest friend, Gouverneur Morris, deliver the eulogy. Morris continued to serve the republic after its founding as envoy to France during the Revolution and Reign of Terror, and as an early visionary who grasped that New York, not Philadelphia, could become the nation’s economic capital if a canal opened the interior to the sea. And yet, despite these achievements, Morris’s legacy is little known today. In this deeply researched biography, The Forsaken Founder, Scott Greenberger restores this indispensable figure to history and asks why one of the most prescient and principled founders faded from memory. Was it his uncompromising opposition to slavery? His unapologetic aristocratic style? His belief that liberty required structure as well as passion? Moving from the battlefields of the American Revolution to the salons of Paris and the blood-soaked streets of the French Revolution, this book restores Morris to his rightful place in history. It is the story of a man admired by giants, resisted by factions, and ultimately forsaken by memory—and of a republic still grappling with the truths he dared to speak.

About the Speaker

Scott S. Greenberger is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis and author of The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur. Currently the executive editor of Stateline, he has been a newspaper reporter at the Austin American-Statesman and The Boston Globe. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and GQ. Greenberger has a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University and a master’s degree in international relations from George Washington University. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

“Wide open vistas of snowcapped mountains provide the most enchanting backdrop for Rush Jenkins and Klaus Baer’s decorating style. Together they craft homes that combine the rustic and the refined with contemporary ease.” – Forbes.com As beautifully shown in their first book, Natural Elegance, the cofounders of WRJ Design, Rush Jenkins and Klaus Baer, have a singular approach to mountain living. They are renowned for incorporating clean – lined, contemporary design into envelopes of rugged stone and natural wood. Now, in their second book, Natural Luxury, they lift this combination of the bespoke and the wild to new heights. It features 10 of their most recent projects, in such idyllic locales as Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Deer Valley, Utah, and Sun Valley, Idaho, including a rustic log cabin nestled near a stream, a modern compound overlooking the Tetons, and even a sophisticated pied–à–terre in Manhattan. Each project illustrates WRJ’s signature blend of luxury, elegance, and deference to the surrounding environment. With breathtaking photography by acclaimed photographers Roger Davies, Matthew Millman and Eric Piasecki, and an inspiring, informative text written with Architectural Digest contributing editor David Foxley, Natural Luxury is a must-have for design and nature lovers alike.

About the Speakers

Rush Jenkins and Klaus Baer are the founders of WRJ Design, the nationally recognized Jackson Hole-based interior design firm celebrated for creating refined luxury homes where bespoke furnishings, distinctive works of art, and natural materials come together in harmony with the surrounding landscape. Guided by a shared vision of timeless design, an enduring connection to nature, and exceptional craftsmanship, they have grown WRJ from a small partnership into one of the country’s leading luxury residential design firms, with a multidisciplinary team of nearly 30 creative professionals. Their work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Veranda, LUXE Interiors + Design, House Beautiful, and Traditional Home, and in 2026 WRJ Design was honored with both a National and Regional LUXE RED Award. The firm is also a four-time winner of Mountain Living’s Home of the Year Award and a recipient of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA) Jacques Benedict Award for Residential Interior Design. Jenkins and Baer are also the authors of the acclaimed design books Natural Elegance: Luxurious Mountain Living and newly released Natural Luxury: Homes Inspired by Nature, both published by Vendome Press.

From award-winning journalist and author John A. Jenkins comes a revolutionary exploration of the summer before Watergate—a parallel world of a half-century ago when America faced events and crises strikingly similar to those of today—told through the lives and words of those who lived it. Inflation rages. Crime is rising. Abortion rights take center stage at the Supreme Court. China poses an existential threat. Black lives are under attack. The president battles the press as he seeks to subvert not just the political order but the rule of law itself. This is the Summer of ’71—a pivotal, operatic season of hope and despair, missed opportunities and era-changing decisions. More than a half-century later, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of events that defined the American experience during that fateful five-month period spanning May to September 1971. On May Day, President Nixon orchestrates a massive police-military response to disrupt the biggest anti-war demonstration in history. Two days later, the Supreme Court announces that it will take up Roe v. Wade. In the weeks and months that follow, friction escalates between the police and the Black Panthers, Congress debates universal healthcare, Attica prisoners riot, and the New York Times publishes the Pentagon Papers—a turning point that ultimately dooms Nixon’s presidency and his legacy. Summer of ’71 brings it all to the page through first-person accounts that are only now becoming available: the papers, diaries, and oral histories of key players. Award‑winning journalist and author John A. Jenkins witnessed many of the events himself, and draws on a multitude of sources, including Nixon’s White House tapes, to tell the story of that time as no one else could. Here is both a fascinating, brilliantly researched read in its own right, and a critical lens through which to view today’s political discord.

About the Speaker

John A. Jenkins is a multi-award-winning journalist, author, publisher, and entrepreneur. With a specialty in partisans and power, he is the author of The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist, and Summer of ’71. He has written hundreds of features for major magazines in the U.S. and abroad, including The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and The Washington Monthly. A 4-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit, one of the highest awards in legal journalism, he is the founder of Law Street Media, one of the most widely visited and highly engaged law-and-policy sites on the web. Prior to starting Law Street, Jenkins served for 15 years as President & Publisher of CQ Press, the leading political science textbook and reference publisher. Currently, he co-leads the predictive-AI start-up PoliScio Analytics, which he co-founded in 2022.

When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, the landmark case overturning Roe v. Wade, it marked a turning point in the lives of millions of Americans. It was also the culmination of a decades-long movement whose grievances were embodied by the man who wrote the court’s opinion: Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. Steely in his demeanor, with an impassive appearance that defies changing fashions, Alito could be the family lawyer in a 1960s television drama. But when he talks there is an emotional undercurrent, a fast-flowing stream beneath a placid surface. This is a man driven to push boundaries and mold ideas. His aim is to right the wrongs of the past six decades, as he saw them. He was the prized son of an Italian-born father and a mother whose parents emigrated from Italy shortly before her birth, worked their way into the middle class despite anti-Catholic prejudice and humiliating setbacks like evictions, and exacting big achievement demands of their children. But his family’s values came under attack during the sixties and later when Alito was at Princeton as the Vietnam war raged, women demanded equality, and their brand of patriotism was devalued. The Federalist Society provided a safe space for Alito and those like him, and he moved fast up the judicial ladder to eventually land on the Supreme Court. There he has been aggressive in pushing the law in new, conservative directions—from pushing for expanding rights for the religious conservatives, overturning affirmative action, extending the right to bear arms to thwart gun controls, and reducing the power of the Environmental Protection Agency. And finally—most crucial to his legacy—he was the author of Dobbs v. Jackson, bringing the conservative legal movement full circle in overruling Roe v. Wade. His ethnic and religious background, his intellectual confidence, and his unyielding determination are all illustrative of a group of men and women who, beset by grievance, embarked on a decades-long mission to change the rules that govern society.

About the Speaker

Peter S. Canellos is the author of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero, and the editor of the bestselling Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy. He served as executive editor at POLITICO, leading the newsroom during the 2016 presidential campaign, and the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. He has also been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors award in 2011 for excellence in editorial writing along with the 2022 George Polk Award, Robin Toner Award, and News Leaders Association Batten Medal for his writing about the Supreme Court.