Consider feathers: They define birds’ wings, enabling flight. They insulate against cold. They repel water. They even control sound. And how feathers work is just one aspect of the wonders of birds explained by pathbreaking researcher and birder Lorna Gibson in Birds Up Close.

Feathers, bones, bills, eggs, flight: all come in for scrutiny in this engaging book. What produces the iridescence of plumage? How does the internal structure of a bird’s bones make them lightweight? How do different birds use their bills and tongues—from woodpeckers penetrating the holes they drill to hummingbirds imbibing nectar, to sandpipers needling the sand, and to phalaropes drawing water droplets containing plankton into their mouths without sucking (no lips!)?

Drawing on her expertise and personal experience in both engineering and ornithology, the author explores the hidden microscopic structures and engineering principles that keep birds aloft and alive—how an egg is formed, how a bird generates lift; how raptors soar and glide, albatrosses fly thousands of miles, hummingbirds hover, puffins and penguins “fly” underwater. She also considers the longer view of birds in their habitats and natural history. Her up-close look at avian mysteries provides a perspective like no other for the expert ornithologist and curious observer alike.

About the Speaker

Lorna Gibson is the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT as well as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT’s top award for undergraduate teaching, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

From the best–selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters comes the story of the American whaleship Mentor, wrecked in 1832 on a remote reef in the western Pacific. With supplies dwindling, the eleven surviving crewmen face not only the miseries of shipwreck in unfamiliar territory but also the profound uncertainty of contact with the Indigenous people of the Micronesian archipelago of Palau, who within days approach the deserted men brandishing axes, clubs, and spears. In this gripping saga of cultural collision, tribal wars, and dashed hopes, award–winning historian Eric Jay Dolin vividly reconstructs the Mentor’s doomed voyage, the years of perilous captivity, and the delicate negotiations and fraught naval rescue mission that followed. Illustrated by more than 100 images and maps, The Wreck of the Mentor is at once a powerful story of survival and a revealing window into the great Age of Sail―a time when maritime ambition collided with local sovereignty, and when the outcome of one voyage rippled across oceans and empires.

About the Speaker

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of seventeen books, including Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America; A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes; Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates; and Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution. Dolin’s books have won many awards including the John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History; Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award; National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award for Adult Nonfiction; Samuel Eliot Morison Book Award for Naval Literature; James P. Hanlan Book Award; and the Outdoor Writers Association of America Book Award. Many of his books have been chosen as “must reads” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Other honors include being chosen as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and as one of the best books of the year by The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, the Library Journal, and Booklist. Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.

In 1909, America was home to 253 automakers, a landscape of visionaries, schemers, and would-be barons of the new century. But when playboy millionaire M. Robert Guggenheim announced an audacious “Ocean to Ocean” contest from New York City to the Seattle World’s Fair, only three companies were brassy enough to show up at the starting line: Acme, Ford, and Shawmut, a promising but star-crossed carmaker from Boston, trying to survive after a factory fire. Oddsmakers favored the Acme and Itala, a pricy import also joining the race, while dismissing the pint-sized Ford — a homely little number called the Model T— and the long-shot Shawmut. In fact, many didn’t believe any of the cars would reach Seattle at all, as they would need to forge a 4,106-mile course of mountain ranges, mud bogs, washed-out wagon bridges, and harrowing canyon trails, long before the era of asphalt highways, seatbelts, and service stations. But Henry Ford was intent on proving that the Model T could go the distance and beat out the muscular luxury cars—and he didn’t plan to leave it to chance. Indeed, a little over three weeks after the race began, a Ford crossed the line hours ahead of the Shawmut. Except that victory was a fraud. The Hardest, Longest Race is a colorful tale of ambition and subterfuge, but it is also a love letter to America at the turn of the Twentieth Century. As a seeming people’s champion—a car for the masses—traverses the vast nation, Moskowitz brings to vivid life the diverse populace and landscape that it would soon transform.

About the Speaker

Eric Moskowitz spent 12 years as a reporter at The Boston Globe, where he won the National Headliner Award for feature writing, shared in the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, and was one of the lead reporters on “The Valedictorians Project,” a Pulitzer finalist examining obstacles to college and career success for many top Boston Public Schools graduates. He has written for The Atlantic and The New York Times, and stories have been featured in The Best American Sports Writingand The Best American Newspaper Narratives anthologies. He recently started a new role as a staff writer at Harvard.

Doug Most is a lifelong journalist and author whose career has spanned newspapers, magazines, and universities up and down the East Coast. He was named Journalist of the Year while at The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, for his coverage of a tragic story about two teens charged with killing their newborn, a story he turned into a true-crime book titled Always in Our Hearts. After a stint at Boston Magazine, he worked for fifteen years at The Boston Globe as the Sunday Magazine editor, and deputy managing editor/special projects. His 2014 nonfiction book, The Race Underground, told the story of the birth of subways in America in the late 1800s and was adapted into a PBS/American Experience documentary. His latest book, Launching Liberty, tells the human story of the Liberty ships of World War II.

We live in an age obsessed with reinvention. On Instagram, in recovery meetings, through name-change petitions, lifestyle pivots, deconversion blogs, and political conversion manifestos, we’re surrounded by stories of radical personal change. But what does it really mean to shed an old skin—and why do some transformations inspire us while others raise our hackles? Longtime New York Times Magazinewriter Benoit Denizet-Lewis, known for his deeply reported and psychologically rich journalism, takes us on a freewheeling, wild-hearted journey into the mystery of human transformation. He introduces us to an unforgettable array of people in flux—including psychedelic reality benders, sexual and gender transitioners, ideological shapeshifters, seemingly reformed murderers, and an octogenarian grandmother trying to change her temperament (“Better late than never!” she says)—as well as those working to engineer change: psychologists, neuroscientists, name-change specialists, even his own father, a breath and meditation teacher who once wrote a newsletter about “the art and science of transformation.” Intertwined with those portraits of change is the author’s own reckoning—by turns painful, poignant, and hilarious—with his misfires and epiphanies. You’ve Changed is a book for anyone who’s ever tried to become someone new, fix what felt broken, drag someone else into changing, or wondered whether real transformation is anything more than a myth we sell ourselves. Denizet-Lewis shows us that profound, positive change is possible—and offers an unexpected, sometimes counterintuitive set of approaches to help us get there. But this is no compass for the dogmatic or the quick-fix brigade. Change, he shows us, is slippery, scary, beautiful, often politically fraught—and best tackled with humility riding shotgun, holding the map upside down.

About the Speaker

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College and a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has written three previous books, including America Anonymous and the New York Times bestseller Travels With Casey. A New America Fellow and NEH Public Scholar, he divides his time between Boston and Prague.

Ellen Barry covers mental health for The New York Times. She was previously the paper’s London-based chief international correspondent and the bureau chief in New Delhi and Moscow, and a reporter for the Boston Globe.

Drawing on previously unmined archival materials and extensive interviews with Trudeau, his friends, fellow cartoonists, prominent journalists, and even politicians who were mocked in the strip, Trudeau & Doonesbury is an entertaining romp through both Trudeau’s remarkable life and the last half century of American history. For more than 50 years, Doonesbury has helped drive the national conversation. The first comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize, Garry Trudeau’s sprawling narrative featuring a host of beloved characters has reflected America back to itself, capturing the highlights and lowlights of American politics and culture with wit and penetrating insight. And as Doonesbury’s characters aged alongside their creator, Trudeau became one of the preeminent chroniclers of the Baby Boom generation.

About the Speaker

An award-winning freelance journalist, Joshua Kendall has written on history, politics, biography, health care, and neuroscience for many national magazines and newspapers, including BusinessWeek, Mother Jones, The Nation, Politico, Slate, Time, Wired, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of four previous biographies, including First Dads: Politics and Parenting from George Washington to Barack Obama.

Lunch on a Beam, also known as Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, shows ironworkers eating lunch on a steel beam during the construction of Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building in 1932. It’s a photo so famous you can likely picture it in your mind: seated in a row, eleven men chat and break bread 850 feet above the ground, the dense cityscape behind them. While the scene may look spontaneous, the photo was taken during a publicity shoot to promote Rockefeller Center’s new skyscraper. And despite the image’s renown, for years, little information was available about its subjects or its photographer. In Lunch on a Beam, Rockefeller Center archivist Christine Roussel interweaves the art, architectural, and social history behind the photograph with her personal experience as a confidante to the financiers who developed Rockefeller Center. She tells the stories of the fearless photographers, brazen publicity men, the ironworkers, and their immigrant and Indigenous communities. This portrait of eleven construction workers, she points out, is also a celebration of the nation’s richest man. She examines how, in the depths of the Great Depression, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., took it upon himself to build a monument to American industry and sell it to the public. Featuring striking images from the Rockefeller Center Archives, Lunch on a Beam calls attention to the fascinating paradoxes contained in a single photo and celebrates the men who built an architectural marvel at great personal risk. This is a story of art and commerce, and the role of a photograph in the myth making of New York City.

About the Speaker

Christine Roussel is the Archivist of the Rockefeller Center Archive. For many years, she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as director of the reproductions studio and special assistant to the director. Upon leaving the museum, she advised Vice President Nelson Rockefeller on his art collection and founded the monument restoration company C. Roussel Inc. Her books include The Art of Rockefeller Center and A Guide to The Art of Rockefeller Center. She lives in New York City.

William Morgan is an architectural historian, photographer, and author of numerous books on American architecture and landscape. He holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware and taught for many years as Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Louisville, with additional appointments at Princeton University and Brown University. His writing has appeared widely in national and international publications, and his architectural criticism has earned two Pulitzer Prize nominations.

In the stormy, scandalous summer of 1816, daring eighteen-year-old Claire Clairmont changed the course of literature forever. But then—unlike her stepsister Mary Shelley—she was forgotten, until now. During the dangerous storms of The Year Without Summer, a group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her fiery fiancé Percy Shelley, the famously promiscuous Lord Byron, and John Polidori, his sexually tormented personal physician. At the group’s center was Claire Clairmont, Mary’s impressionable, clever, and dangerously loyal stepsister. Those months of desire, betrayal, and creative passion gave the world the works of Frankenstein, the modern vampire, and the mythic image of these Romantic literary giants. In this intense and propulsive story of love, lust, art and betrayal Claire tells her story, trying to solve the mystery of why she was all but erased from history. Claire—herself a writer—is desperate to free herself from the uncomfortable role she plays in her sister’s marriage in London. Fueled by Jane Austin’s romantic novels, and believing love offers freedom, Claire begins an affair with celebrity Lord Byron and convinces Mary and Shelley to follow him to Switzerland. With the threat of paparazzi lurking nearby, Claire’s intimate connection to each member of the celebrity group grows more complex. Her journey of self-discovery leads her to document everyone’s secrets in her journal, and when climate disaster causes food shortages, Claire learns to forage, determined to prove her worth in a world built by and created for men. The real Claire Clairmont poured her love, life, and razor-sharp wit into her pages, yet her journal from 1816 is curiously missing and each member of the group had a reason to take it. With searing relevance to our here and now—of celebrity worship, climate disaster, of complicated femininity, Love & Other Monsters is the untold origin story of Frankenstein, a feminist reckoning of sisters, survival, and the creation of monsters—both those on the page and those who walk among us.

About the Speaker

Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of twenty-five books including The Lioness of Boston, based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner, now in its eleventh printing and recently featured as a clue on Jeopardy! Her fiction, poetry, essays, and photos have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, Guernica, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, among many other places, as well as featured and read aloud on National Public Radio, longlisted for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her next novel Love & Other Monsters, historical fiction based on the forgotten—but important life of Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister who was integral in the creation of Frankenstein, will be published in April 2026. She lives outside of Boston with her spouse and four children.

Ilyon Woo is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of MASTER SLAVE HUSBAND WIFE: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, an instant New York Times best-seller, one of the New York Times “Ten Best Books of the Year,” a People Magazine “Top 10 Book of the Year,” and a finalist for a Kirkus Prize. She is also the author of THE GREAT DIVORCE: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University.