Wednesday April 9 2003 at 7pm at Central Library
Adrian Wooldridge on “How the Company changed the World”

Hegel predicted that the basic unit of modern society would be the state.  Marx thought it would the commune.  Lenin and Hitler said it would be the political party.  Adrian Wooldridge, Washington correspondent for The Economist and co-author of The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, contends that they were all wrong.  The most important organization in the world is the company: the basis of prosperity of the West and the best hope for the future of the rest of the world.

Monday April 21 2003 at 7 pm at Central Library
Walter Russell Mead on “After Iraq: the Future of American Foreign Policy”

Mead, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of several books, including Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, will offer a striking new vision of America’s place in the world.  Transcending the stale debates between realists and idealist; hawks and doves, Mead provides a nuanced, historically grounded view of American foreign policy, past, present, and future.

Monday May 5 2003 at 7 pm at Central Library
Sam Quiñones on “Democracy and Revolutionary Change in Mexico”

Newspapers trumpeted Vicente Fox’s election as Mexico’s president with the headlines “Ya Cambió”—Change has Come. But Sam Quiñones, Mexico City-based journalist and author of True Tales from Another Mexico, argues that much of Mexico was changing before the July 2000 presidential elections.  Quiñones argues that Fox’s victory marked the triumph of another Mexico, a vital, energetic, and creative Mexico, one that Quinones has been chronicling for several years.

Wednesday June 4 2003 at 7 pm at Central Library
Debra Dickerson on “The End of Blackness”

Dickerson, an award-winning essayist and author of An American Story will preview her upcoming book, The End of Blackness, which argues that the concept of blackness, as it has come to be understood, is rapidly losing its ability to describe, let alone predict or manipulate, the political and social behavior of African Americans.  Bold, original, and controversial, The New York Times agrees that “it is a startling thing to hear an American speak as frankly and un-self-servingly about race as Dickerson.”