Journalist Masha Gessen curates provocative 2018 Festival Albertine.

“To be a democracy,” writes courageous and prodigious journalist, Masha Gessen, “a country has to be engaged in the pursuit of imagining a democracy. In times of crisis of democracy . . . we need to be doing the work of imagining.

“The insistence that ‘it can’t happen here,’ betrays a failure of the imagination,” counters Russian-American Gessen. “The experience of seeing a country turn away from democracy trains the imagination to know that ‘it’ can happen anywhere. But the demagogue dangles a carrot for the imagination: he traffics in what the social psychologist Erich Fromm called “the imaginary past.” The antidote for the appeal of the imaginary past is a vision of a glorious future, and this is where we fail… [T]ragically.” As we see – daily.

“. . . Can we come back from tragic failure?” At the behest of the French Embassy Cultural Services and their Albertine bookstore, Gessen imagined six Festival programs to inspire our vital effort.

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Economics Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz is known for his critical view of laissez-faire colleagues:

The future of work, or, rather, the world after work. . . . Can we imagine a time, suggests Masha Gessen, when we value people not for what they produce but for who they are – and what might this future look like? Note: Eventbrite RSVP required. This session of Festival Albertine 2018 will incite you to consider how your descendants will relate to work – in the company of an American Nobel economist, plus a leading AI scientist and teacher, and a distinguished economist, both of the latter, French.

Not only the founding director of Facebook AI Research and of the NYU Center for Data Science, Yann LeCun now is Chief AI Scientist at Facebook, teaches at NYU (Silver Professor) and  Continue reading →