At the turn of the millennium, Editorial Assistant Clodagh “Clo” Harmon wants nothing more than to rise through the ranks at the world’s most prestigious fashion magazine. There’s just one problem: she doesn’t have the right pedigree. Instead, Clo is a “workhorse” surrounded by beautiful, wealthy, impossibly well-connected “show horses” who get ahead without effort, including her beguiling cubicle-mate, Davis Lawrence, the daughter of a beloved but fading Broadway actress. Harry Wood, Davis’s boarding school classmate and a reporter with visions of his own media empire, might be Clo’s ally in gaming the system—or he might be the only thing standing between Clo and her rightful place at the top. In a career punctuated by moments of high absurdity, sudden windfalls, and devastating reversals of fortune, Clo wades across boundaries, taking ever greater and more dangerous risks to become the important person she wants to be within the confines of a world where female ambition remains cloaked. But who really is Clo underneath all the borrowed designer clothes and studied manners—and who are we if we share her desires? Hilariously observant and insightful, Workhorse is a brilliant page-turner about what it means to be in thrall to wealth, beauty, and influence, and the outrageous sacrifices women must make for the sake of success.

About the Speakers

From 2014 to 2019, Caroline Palmer was the director of editorial, video, and social media at Amazon Fashion. Prior to her tenure at Amazon, she spent seven years as the editor of Vogue. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times, Life, Seventeen magazine, and Vogue. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and three children. Workhorse is her first novel.

Todd Plummer is a Boston-based writer and attorney. He started his career with an internship at Vogue under Caroline Palmer in 2010, and went on to work as a society reporter in New York City for five years, and a travel writer across seven continents for ten.

On April 14, 1975, Myles Connor, already a known art thief, entered the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in disguise along with a cohort. The pair went directly the Dutch Gallery and proceeded to remove Portrait of Elsbeth van Rijn from its place on the wall. After a brief scuffle with the guards—with Myles deterring his partner from shooting a bystander—the pair was gone, leaving behind no traceable evidence amidst the mayhem. Who was Myles Connor and what were his motivations? Most thieves are in it for the money, but Myles was far from most thieves. His motive was freedom. The summer before the heist, he was arrested by the FBI when he attempted to sell three highly valuable paintings by Andrew and N.C. Wyeth to an undercover agent. Incredibly, Myles did this while out on bail for possession of yet more stolen art. When he was arrested and placed in the back seat of a state police vehicle, the FBI agent said to him, “We’ve got you now. Let’s see you get out of this one.” Without batting an eye, Connor calmly replied, “Just you watch me.” Again released on bail, Connor met with an old friend of his father’s, Massachusetts State Police Major John Regan. Regan worked for the District Attorney at the time, future Congressman William Delahunt. Connor asked Regan if there was any way out of the fix he was in, and the straightlaced cop told him bluntly, “It’s going to take a Rembrandt to get you out of this one.” With that, a master plan was hatched. But there was a flip side to this story. One involving Connor’s best friend—Al Dotoli—who lived a life in the music industry, far from the world of art heists. Dotoli’s own masterpiece of a plan hinged on the Rembrandt’s return. Filled with unforgettable personalities and non-stop action and intrigue, Anthony Amore layed out the anatomy of this notorious art theft while describing not just the criminal genius that is Myles Connor, but also the complexity of personal relationships between lifelong friends. Our audience learned about a breathtaking painting by the world’s most famous artist and the incredible true story about how Portrait of Elsbeth van Rijn ended up on the wall at the MFA in the first place.

About the Speaker
Anthony Amore is a leading expert in security, investigations, and art crime. He has held senior roles with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and served as Director of Security and Chief Investigator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where he continues to investigate the infamous 1990 heist of 13 famous masterpieces. A bestselling author, Amore has written four acclaimed books on art crime. His latest, The Rembrandt Heist, was recently named one of the ten best history books of 2025 by Smithsonian Magazine. He teaches at Harvard University and is a licensed private investigator and a consultant to museums, law firms, and high-net-worth clients.

Reflecting in a touching preface on the major caregivers in his own life, Joseph Luzzi narrated the fascinating history of this revolutionary orphanage, offering readers the first comprehensive “biography” of a groundbreaking humanitarian institution that recognized poor and abandoned children as worthy of nurture—and thereby shaped education and childcare for generations to come. The story began with the abandonment of the newborn Agata Smeralda on February 5, 1445, in Florence’s Hospital of the Innocents, the first—but certainly not the last—child to be left at its doors. In an era when children were frequently abandoned, often trafficked or left to die on the streets, an orphanage devoted to their care and protection was a striking innovation. The Innocenti, as it has come to be called—the first orphanage in Europe devoted exclusively to unwanted children—would go on to care for nearly 400,000 young lives over the next five centuries. Built by the Silk Weavers Guild at a time when the wealthy were expected to contribute to civic life, the Innocenti featured glorious arches designed by Filippo Brunelleschi and housed works by some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, from the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio to the sculptor Luca della Robbia. Meanwhile, the new orphanage also redefined the idea of “childhood” itself, particularly in education, as boys were often taught not just Latin and basic numeracy, but also a well-rounded curriculum that included art, literature, and music. Girls learned viable trades such as weaving and silk manufacturing, and the Innocenti assisted them in securing suitable marriages to protect them from poverty or a life of prostitution. Over the centuries, the orphanage oversaw groundbreaking scientific discoveries—it was a birthplace of modern pediatrics—while struggling against rampant disease, constant financial crises, and the dramatic ups and downs of Florentine politics in the Medici era.

About the Speaker
Joseph Luzzi (PhD Yale) is the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, where he also teaches courses on film and Italian Studies. He is the author of nine books, including his recent Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (Norton, 2022), a New Yorker Best Books of 2022 selection and shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. His other books include Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (Yale University Press, 2008), which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies; A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), a finalist for the international prize “The Bridge Book” Award; My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins, 2015), which has been translated into multiple languages. Joseph’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TLS, Bookforum, and American Scholar, among others, and his scholarly writing has appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Notes, Modern Language Quarterly, Raritan, Italica, and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. His media appearances include a profile in the Guardian and an interview with National Public Radio. Among his honors are a Dante Society of America essay prize, Yale College teaching prize, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award, and fellowships from the National Humanities Center and Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. The first American-born child in his Italian immigrant family, Luzzi was named Cittadino Onorario / Honorary Citizen of Acri, Calabria, in 2017.

In 1940, with the Nazis sweeping through France, Henri Matisse found himself at a personal and artistic crossroads. His 42-year marriage had ended, he was gravely ill, and after decades at the forefront of modern art, he was beset by doubt. As scores of famous figures escaped the country, Matisse took refuge in Nice, with his companion, Lydia Delectorskaya. By defiantly remaining, Matisse was a source of inspiration for his nation. While enemy agents and Resistance fighters played cat-and-mouse in the alleyways of Nice, Matisse’s son, Jean, engaged in sabotage efforts with the Allies. In Paris, under the swastika, Matisse’s estranged wife, Amélie, worked for the Communist underground. His beloved daughter, Marguerite, active in the French Resistance, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, sentenced to Ravensbruck concentration camp—and miraculously escaped when her train was halted by Allied bombs. His younger, son, Pierre helped Jewish artists escape to New York; even his teenaged grandson risked his life by defying the Germans and their Vichy collaborators. Amidst this chaos, Matisse responded to the dark days of war by inventing a dazzling new paper technique that led to some of his most iconic pieces, including The Fall of Icarus, his profile of Charles De Gaulle, Monsieur Loyal, and his groundbreaking cut-out book, Jazz. His wartime works were acts of resistance, subtly patriotic and daringly new. Drawing on intimate letters and a multitude of other sources, Christopher C. Gorham illuminated for us this momentous stage of Matisse’s life as never before, revealing an artist on a journey of reinvention, wrenching meaning from the suffering of war, and holding up the light of human imagination against the torch of fascism to create some of the most exciting work of his career, of the 20th century, and in the history of art.

About the Speaker
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.

John Gennari shared the story of how a small town in New England became a home for jazz, challenging conventional assumptions about the relationship between culture and landscape, art and geography, town and city, and race and place. This is a book about what happened in the 1950s in a barn, an icehouse, and a greenhouse in the verdant Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Against the backdrop of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the expansion of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and postwar cultural tourism, two New Yorkers bought part of a sprawling estate in Lenox, where they converted an old barn and other outbuildings into an inn that could host musical performances and seminars. The Berkshire Music Barn went on to host jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and Billie Holiday, as well as jazz roundtables grounded in folkloric approaches to the music. The Jazz Barn explores the cultural significance of venues like the Berkshire Music Barn and later the Lenox School of Jazz to tell a surprising story about race, culture, and place. John Gennari explores how a predominantly white New England town became a haven for African American musicians, and reveals the Berkshires as an important incubator not just of American literature and classical music but also of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Ornette Coleman’s “new thing.” The Berkshire Music Barn became a crucial space for the mainstreaming of jazz. By the late 1950s, the School of Jazz was an epicenter of the genre’s avant-garde. Richly illustrated with the photographs of Clemens Kalischer among others, The Jazz Barn demonstrates that the locations where jazz is played and heard indelibly shape the music and its meanings.

About the Speaker

John Gennari is Professor of English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. Gennari’s previous book, Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge (University of Chicago Press, 2017), is a study of Black/Italian cultural intersections in music and vernacular soundscapes, foodways, sports, and other forms of expressive culture. His earlier book, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2006), won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Criticism and the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Book in American Culture Studies.

Arthur Bahr offers a unique study of the only physical manuscript containing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, exploring it as both a material and literary object. In this book, Bahr takes a fresh look at the four poems and twelve illustrations of the so-called “Pearl-Manuscript,” the only surviving medieval copy of two of the best-known Middle English poems: Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript, Bahr explores how the physical manuscript itself enhances our perception of the poetry, drawing on recent technological advances (such as spectroscopic analysis) to show the Pearl-Manuscript to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood. By connecting the manuscript’s construction to the intricate language in the texts, Bahr suggests new ways to understand both what poetry is and what poetry can do.

About the Speaker

Arthur Bahr is professor of literature and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His first book, Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (University of Chicago Press, 2013), showed how medieval manuscripts were often artfully sequenced and laid out so as to enhance the literary potential of the compilation as a whole. His new book, Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight (University of Chicago Press, 2025), applies those insights to the only surviving copy of four extraordinary Middle English poems: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and (most famously) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Poor boy. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. In repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world of government censorship and religious authoritarianism comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with a daring desire to be known ― and an uncanny ear for Latin poetry. A torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, like Christopher Marlowe, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Marlowe seizes in his rare opportunity for a classical education, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture. His astonishing literary success will, in turn, nourish the talent of a collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare. Dark Renaissance illuminates both Marlowe’s times and the origins and significance of his work ― from his erotic translations of Ovid to his portrayal of unfettered ambition in a triumphant Tamburlaine to Doctor Faustus, his unforgettable masterpiece about making a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge. Introducing us to Marlowe’s transgressive genius in the form of a thrilling page-turner, Stephen Greenblatt brings a penetrating understanding of the literary work to reveal the inner world of the author, bringing to life a homosexual atheist who was tormented by his own compromises, who refused to toe the party line, and who was murdered just when he had found love. Meanwhile, he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world, including Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

About the Speaker

Stephen Greenblatt, PhD, is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning The Swerve.

Ray Madoff tells us about her revelatory book that lifts the curtain on America’s most consequential public deception: how the rich get richer using tools the government gave them. Amid conflicting narratives about the drivers of wealth and inequality in the United States, one constant hovers in the background: the US tax code. No political force has been more consequential—or more utterly opaque—than the 7,000-page document that details who pays what in American society and government. Most of us have a sense that it’s an unfair system. But does anyone know exactly how it’s unfair? Legal scholar Ray D. Madoff knows. In The Second Estate, she offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of America’s byzantine system of taxation, laying bare not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit. This is not a story of offshore accounts or secret tax havens. In The Second Estate, Madoff shows that the US system itself has, over time, been stripped and reconstituted such that it now offers a series of secret paths, hidden in plain sight, for wealthy people in the know to avoid taxation altogether. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly—and maddeningly—cheap.

About the Speaker

Ray D. Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School and the cofounder and director of the Boston College Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good. She is the author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead and lead author of The Practical Guide to Estate Planning. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books, among other outlets.

After the fall of France in June 1940, all that stood between Adolf Hitler and total victory was a narrow stretch of water and the defiance of the British people. Desperate for allies, Winston Churchill did everything he could to bring the United States into the conflict, drive the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany apart, and persuade neutral countries to resist German domination.

By early 1942, after the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British-Soviet-American alliance was in place. Yet it was an improbable and incongruous coalition, divided by ideology and politics and riven with mistrust and deceit. Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin were partners in the fight to defeat Hitler, but they were also rivals who disagreed on strategy, imperialism, and the future of liberated Europe. Only by looking at their areas of conflict, as well as cooperation, are we able to understand the course of the war and world that developed in its aftermath.

Allies at War is a fast-paced, narrative history, based on material drawn from more than a hundred archives. Using vivid, firsthand accounts and unpublished diaries, Bouverie invites readers into the rooms where the critical decisions were made and goes beyond the confines of the Grand Alliance to examine, among other topics, the doomed Anglo-French partnership and fractious relations with General Charles de Gaulle and the Free French, and interactions with Poland, Greece, Francoist Spain and neutral Ireland, Yugoslavia, and Nationalist China.

Ambitious and compelling, revealing the political drama behind the military events, Allies at War offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War and the origins of the Cold War.

About the Speaker

Tim Bouverie is a British historian and author of the UK bestseller Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World. His first book, Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. A graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, he was the 2021 Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Pulitzer-Prize winner Jon Meacham writes of Allies at War: “Tim Bouverie has done a remarkable thing: He has found a novel and illuminating way to tell the story of World War II, and in so doing has given us an important and timely study of the centrality and complexity of alliances. This is a terrific book.”

John McPhee has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965 and has written more than thirty acclaimed books that began on the magazine’s pages. But few readers know or fully appreciate the true breadth of his writing. Looking for a Story is a complete reader’s guide to McPhee’s vast published work, documenting much rarely seen or connected with McPhee, including remarkable early writing for Time magazine published without his name. In chronicling McPhee’s career where he broke ground applying devices long associated with fiction to the literature of fact, Noel Rubinton gave us insights into McPhee’s techniques, choice of subjects, and research methods, shedding light on how McPhee turns complicated subjects like geology into compelling stories. Beyond detailing more than seventy years of McPhee’s writing, Rubinton recounted McPhee’s half century as a Princeton University writing professor, a little known part of his legacy. McPhee inspired generations of students who wrote hundreds of books of their own, also catalogued here. With an incisive foreword by New Yorker staff writer and former McPhee student Peter Hessler, Looking for a Story also includes extensive annotated listings of articles about McPhee, reviews of his books, and interviews, readings, and speeches. Whether you are already an admirer of McPhee or new to his writings, this book provides an invaluable road map to his rich body of work.

About the Speaker

Noel Rubinton is a journalist whose writing has appeared in leading publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He was a reporter and editor for Newsday for many years. His writing has spanned many fields, including government, politics, culture, transportation, and history. His essay about H.P. Lovecraft and Providence is collected in the New York Times book Footsteps: Literary Pilgrimages Around the World and he wrote the foreword to Repression, Re-invention, & Rugelach: A History of Jews at Colgate. A graduate of Deerfield Academy and Brown University, he has been reading John McPhee’s writing for many decades.

Cullen Murphy is an editor at large at The Atlantic, where for two decades he was managing editor. He has also been an editor at large at Vanity Fair. His books include Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday (2022), Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe (2017), and Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (2007). For 25 years he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant.