The Atlantic Festival Announces New Events Across New York City
Among the speakers announced today: actor Robert Downey Jr. and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, in conversation with The Atlantic 's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg; actor Tom Hanks, who voices several historical figures in the new Ken Burns documentary series The American Revolution and who will join the premiere screening of the series at the Town Hall; comedian, writer, and director Richard Ayoade in a conversation moderated by talk-show host, comedian, and producer David Letterman; Executive Producer of The Apollo Kamilah Forbes; Professor of Marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur Scott Galloway; clinical psychologist and Founder and CEO of Good Inside Becky Kennedy; and TV personality, chef, author, and activist Andrew Zimmern. Previously announced Festival speakers include Mark Cuban, Jennifer Doudna, Arvind Krishna, Monica Lewinsky, Tekedra Mawakana, H.R. McMaster, and Clara Wu Tsai.
The Atlantic Festival will also host an exclusive first look for Season 3 of Netflix's The Diplomat, which debuts this fall, followed by a conversation with the show's stars Keri Russell and Allison Janney and creator and executive producer Debora Cahn; a sneak peek screening of FX's The Lowdown, along with a talk with creator, executive producer, writer, and director Sterlin Harjo and executive producer and star Ethan Hawke; and a screening of The American Revolution, followed by a discussion with directors and producers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, along with actor Tom Hanks, who voices several historical figures, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed.
New this year: The Atlantic Festival introduces Out and Abouts, intimate events around the city that are ticketed individually. Among the events announced today:
Atlantic Reads book talks at McNally Jackson Seaport. Featuring Walter Mosley for his new novel Gray Dawn; Susan Orlean for her memoir Joyride; and a poetry conversation around The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry, featuring the book's editor and Atlantic contributing editor Walt Hunter, with Singing Word contributor and MIT professor Joshua Bennett.
Premiere of Dread Beat an' Blood at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), featuring a live performance by legendary poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
The Big Story Live events, across downtown venues:
'What Does it Mean to Be an American?,' at the Tenement Museum, featuring staff writers Xochitl Gonzalez and Clint Smith, plus more speakers to be announced.
'The Future of the Arts in a Changing World,' at Hauser & Wirth, featuring Jeffrey Goldberg, Noah Hawley, and Kamilah Forbes, with more speakers to be announced.
With more to be announced, including a live taping of the Radio Atlantic podcast.
The festival's Single-Day Passes and Out and About tickets will go on sale this Wednesday, July 23, at 11 a.m. ET. Atlantic subscribers receive an exclusive 30 percent discount on festival passes and select Out & About programming.
Festival sessions will be led by Goldberg and many of The Atlantic 's writers and editors, including Adrienne LaFrance, Tim Alberta, Ross Andersen, Anne Applebaum, Gal Beckerman, Elizabeth Bruenig, Sophie Gilbert, Jemele Hill, Walt Hunter, Shirley Li, Ashley Parker, and Clint Smith.
The 2025 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Microsoft at the Title Level; CenterWell, Eli Lilly and Company, and Scout Motors at the Presenting Level; and Aflac, Allstate, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Destination DC, Diageo, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, Hauser & Wirth, KPMG, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the Supporting Level.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Epoch Times
17 hours ago
- Epoch Times
‘My Friends': A Novel About Living and Laughing
Author Fredrik Backman writes about suffering and how small moments of kindness and beauty can illuminate the way through it. His very successful novel, 'A Man Called Ove,' was adapted into a film in his native Sweden, as well as into a U.S. film called 'A Man Called Otto,' starring Tom Hanks. Backman's latest book, 'My Friends,' is a hilarious and tender view into the private lives of several friends who inspired a famous painting, and the young newcomer who sparks a change in all of them. The book examines how art can motivate us, what it means to be alive, and the precious gift of laughter. Lashing Out Louisa is a tall, 17-year-old foster home denizen who's about to commit an act of vandalism. 'Sometimes Louisa is a genius, but sometimes she isn't a genius,' which means sometimes she does stupid things. She's also described as being 'world-class' angry.
CBS News
a day ago
- CBS News
Revere Beach Sand Sculpting Festival road closures, parking bans start today
The Revere Beach International Sand Sculpting Festival is back for a 21st year this weekend, and street closures and parking bans begin today. The three-day festival brings hundreds of thousands of people to Revere Beach Boulevard to watch 15 master sand sculptors compete for prizes. Organizers say it's the largest free event in Massachusetts. The festival also comes with a lot of traffic. Visitors are urged to take the MBTA Blue Line to the Revere Beach or Wonderland stops if possible. On Thursday, July 24, Revere Beach Boulevard will be closed between Shirley Avenue and Chester Avenue from noon to 11 p.m. The following closures are in effect from Friday at 5:30 p.m. to Monday at 12 a.m. West Street will remain open for restaurant and resident parking. A parking ban is in effect from Thursday to Sunday on Revere Beach Boulevard between West Street to Chester Avenue, as well as Ocean Avenue between Beach Street and Chester Avenue. The festival theme this year is the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, and a "centerpiece sand sculpture" will honor Paul Revere's midnight ride. Visitors can also expect more than 75 food trucks and vendors at the festival, plus a fireworks display on Saturday night. Here's the schedule of events: Friday (Festival hours: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.)8 a.m. to 5 p.m. - Sand sculpting competition Saturday (Festival hours: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.) 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. - Sand sculpting competition10 a.m. - People's Choice voting begins4 p.m. People's Choice voting closes6 p.m. - Awards ceremony9 p.m. - Fireworks Sunday festival hours are from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
New York Times
a day ago
- New York Times
The Circus Comes to Williamstown, With Celebrities and Beefcake
You weren't likely to miss Jeremy O. Harris on Sunday in the lobby of the '62 Center for Theater & Dance. At 6-foot-5, plus hair, he stood a head or more above the babble of the crowd. Dressed as always to delight, this time in bright striped pants and a faux-needlepoint floral top, he looked like a maypole, people swirling around him. Or maybe he was more of a lightning rod; as the creative director for this year's Williamstown Theater Festival, his brief was to bring the buzz to an institution that needed it, without burning the place down. But having spent three days racing from one event he had programmed to another, sometimes with barely a half-hour to catch a bite in between, I began to think of Harris, the 'Slave Play' playwright and walking Rolodex, as something else, too: a ringmaster, half visionary, half hokum. Come see the what-are-they-doing-here stars! (Pamela Anderson in 'Camino Real'? Why not?) Dare to experience the melodrama on ice! (Change out of those open-toe shoes, missy!) Wonder at the endless parades of beefcake! (Harris's play 'Spirit of the People,' one of the centerpiece events, might well have been called 'Men in Thongs.') In short, the long-hallowed, lately-harrowed festival is nothing this year if not a circus. Circuses can be fun if you bring few expectations. I tried to lower mine, but it was difficult, given the more traditional theatrical pleasures I'd experienced during visits here over the course of 45 summers. (In 1980, less pleasurably, I was a 'general assistant,' staying up all night slinging waffles and getting yelled at.) More recently, complaints of unfair treatment, racial discrimination and unsafe working conditions had made the festival's operating model untenable, eventually leading to this year's mad experimentation. Harris himself seemed to acknowledge the madness, telling my colleague Michael Paulson that the season, loosely based on European models and focused on the world of Tennessee Williams, might produce 'jewels' from 'raw, weird things' or might be 'a colossal failure.' He was right. On both counts. I don't want to ding an idea still aborning, and it's nice that he's pitched a very big tent. But 'raw' is putting it mildly. Much of what I saw during the first of the festival's three public weekends was under-rehearsed or overthought. Some of it was merely baffling. The Williams connections sometimes seemed stretched to the vanishing point and other times so tightly wound as to suggest parody. Ticketing, including weekend passes for preset 'itineraries,' was bizarrely complicated, with seven core events plus installations, pop-ups and late-night hangs. Few of them started on time, and fewer ended that way. But chaos is not itself failure, and certainly it did not prevent some of the promised jewels from shining. Top among them was Samuel Barber's 'Vanessa,' presented at the festival in a version vastly reduced from the one audiences saw at its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 1958. Some small roles along with the entire chorus were cut, and the original's large orchestra became a seven-player band. It now tells its story — about a woman who has barely moved for 20 years, hoping to remain beautiful for the return of her lover — in just 100 enthralling minutes. transcript [MUSIC] Unlike many abridged operas, this one lost little in being concentrated, partly because Gian Carlo Menotti's intense, almost neurotic libretto profits, like a wailing babe, from tight swaddling. At Williamstown, the tight swaddling came in the form of R.B. Schlather's chic, disciplined, minimalist production, using shadows cast on a long white wall to create a devastating X-ray of the story. A top-notch cast a few feet from my face wailed thrillingly. Did this have anything to do with Williams? You could perhaps connect the gothic aspects of 'Vanessa' to the playwright's hothouse style, and certainly Vanessa herself belongs in the pantheon of floridly suffering straight women like Blanche DuBois and Alexandra Del Lago created and flayed by gay authors. I got to see more of those women back at the Center for Drama & Dance, where three plays were running in repertory. In Harris's 'Spirit of the People,' the woman was Genevieve, a brittle yet entitled American in Mexico. Played by Amber Heard in her professional stage debut, she becomes a mezcal impresario and a kind of death doula to a circle of toxic queer tourists in skimpy beachwear. I can't grade the play itself — critics were asked not to review it — but I can give it five out of five beefcake stars, and five as well for Williams relevance. Indeed, 'Spirit of the People' (a pun, in part, on the mezcal) is in some ways a Williams collage, drawing heavily on all his plays — Heard ends up on a hot tin roof — but especially 'Camino Real,' a surrealistic hodgepodge from 1953. The festival's big, handsome production of that experimental work, directed by Dustin Wills, did not alas justify its revival, except as an object of historical interest for Williams completists. Also, admittedly, for beefcake completists: In the central role of Kilroy, Nicholas Alexander Chavez channeled Marlon Brando in a white T-shirt about 10 sizes too small and distressed to the point of transparency. I'm hardly objecting to sexy men — or women, for that matter. (Anderson, as the tragic if often inaudible Camille figure, was a knockout in strapless black velvet.) But when buried sexuality is unburied, other considerations get shoved aside. That was the case with Williams's 'Not About Nightingales,' a 1938 drama not produced in his lifetime — with good cause in two senses. (It's an impassioned but sloppy cry for prison reform.) In exploring the familiar trope of jailhouse homoeroticism even where Williams took care to suppress it, Robert O'Hara's otherwise sturdy production did the playwright's plea no favors. It's disappointing that the three big plays at the Center for Theater & Dance were the new offerings least reminiscent of the old festival's excellence, despite its intention to honor a connection to Williams going back to 1956. But you can't really honor what you don't quite trust. The names of the sandwiches at Pappa Charlie's Deli on Water Street, where playgoers dashed for quick bites between shows, may still honor beloved Williamstown stars — the Blythe Danner (tuna and sprouts); the Olympia Dukakis (feta and avocado) — but the archival production photos that used to line the halls of the main stage were gone. If the past seemed to require re-education or even redaction, perhaps that's why the three shows at the so-called Annex, four miles east on Route 2, felt freer and more satisfying than the ones in Williamstown proper. The Annex has no theatrical history, having until recently been a Rent-A-Center and before that a Price Chopper. Along with 'Vanessa,' the Annex offered two fine shows. On Friday afternoon, 'The Things Around Us,' an hourlong solo by the droll multi-instrumentalist Ahamefule J. Oluo, was a promising start to the weekend, exploring through melancholy stories interspersed with hypnotic music the interpenetration of opposites: past and future, nothing and everything, order and chaos. And then, on Sunday morning, came the joyful bookend: 'Many Happy Returns,' a dance piece by Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri. Sprightly, humorous, with a motif of finger snaps to go with oldies like 'Take Good Care of My Baby,' it told as lightly as possible the tale of four inseparable high school friends now separated except in memory. transcript [MUSIC] None of the Annex shows, it bears noting, were plays, and all were jobbed in. 'Vanessa' was created for the festival by the New York City-based Heartbeat Opera; 'The Things Around Us' has been on tour for a while; 'Many Happy Returns' ran for a few weeks in January at Playwrights Horizons. Also not a play was the seventh core offering, the one on ice. At the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink, home of the North Berkshire Youth Hockey Black Bears, five talented skaters performed Will Davis's 'The Gig,' a diverting if impenetrable riff on a late Williams novel called 'Moise and the World of Reason.' As the skaters swirled and swooshed in pretty patterns and garish costumes, never enacting the story literally but suggesting a circle of queer friends and lovers, the audience listened on headphones to selections from the novel while trying to stay warm. That one of the characters in the source material is in fact a skater seemed a very thin thread to hang the concept on. But the ideas binding the other offerings were hardly more robust. That Williams celebrated 'the outcast and derelict and the desperate' (as he wrote in a letter quoted in the festival program) is a lovely notion, but not much of an organizing principle. It would exclude almost nothing ever written, sung, danced or skated. Perhaps the more salient connection was Harris; it seemed that his imagination was the main thing being celebrated and the only glue holding the weekend together. (He narrated 'The Gig'; his niece and nephew performed in 'Camino Real.') Fair enough; Nikos Psacharopoulos, a festival founder, ran the place for decades as a cult of personality despite having one of the worst personalities I've ever encountered. Harris at least is charming. And if his primary goal was to use his cultural currency to serve artists while secondarily challenging audiences who don't mind spending money on duds in the hope of the occasional jewel, perhaps he succeeded. The big tent of creativity he designed was mostly sideshows, but it wasn't entirely empty.
