Starting Tomorrow: “Breaking the Grip”—
Ben Rhodes, Astra Taylor, and Fintan O’Toole on the Midterms

October 27 and November 9, 2026

In November Democrats could take back power in Congress, if the polls are to be believed. But will they? Is Trump’s unpopularity enough to shake up turnout, and will voters’ rights be respected everywhere? Where does the balance of power lie between progressives and centrists in the Democratic Party?

Fintan O’Toole, Advising Editor of The New York Review, hosts contributors Ben Rhodes and Astra Taylor to discuss these questions and more in a two-part online conversation, to be held before and after the midterms, that takes the measure of America at a crucial moment. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public. Registration grants access to both installments.

Register for “Breaking the Grip” Today!

Delicate Complications:
Daniel Mendelsohn on Jane Austen

Three weekly sessions, starting November 4, 2026

Daniel Mendelsohn’s third seminar in his “Unrequited Love” series will be devoted to Jane Austen’s final—and, for some of us, most profound novel, Persuasion (1817). Austen’s delicate study of amorous misunderstandings and second chances afforded to more mature characters—the 27-year-old Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, the man she had rejected years earlier—marks an interesting shift from her previous novels, and allows us to shift our focus from male authors’ idealization (and, often, fetishization) of female love objects by looking at “love gone wrong” through the point of view of an intelligent woman of profound sensibility.

Three one-hour sessions: November 4, 11, and 18. All sessions will start at 7pm EST. Memberships begin at $99 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

Register for “Delicate Complications”

Edwin Frank on Charles Dickens’

Five weekly sessions, starting March 3, 2027

Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens’s last completed novel, may be his most astounding book, a panoramic view of Victorian society, its overlords and its underworlds, all gripped tight in the dead hand of new money. Speculation and peculation, blackmail and bribery, scrounging, conniving, hoarding, and begging are unending in a book in which corruption is the order of the day and nothing’s not for sale. But Our Mutual Friend is also an exorbitant, exuberant showpiece, a carousel of characters and stories and different kinds of storytelling, with mystery, melodrama, murder, and marriage (for better or for worse) all featuring in a book that combines grittiest realism with fairy tale wonder.

Is Dickens simply pouring out his whole bag of authorial tricks here or, in a book that is as death-haunted as it is outraged and weird, is he venturing onto new imaginative ground? The seminar, led by Edwin Frank, Editor of the New York Review Books Classics series, will take Our Mutual Friend apart and put it back together, the better to consider what this great strange book is about and what it means today.

Five one-hour sessions: March 3, 10, 17, 24, and 31. All sessions will start at 7pm EST. Memberships begin at $149 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

Register for Charles Dickens

Other Upcoming Seminars Lead by Daniel Mendelsohn

Total Degradation:
W. Somerset Maugham

Begins January 6, 2027

Explaining Love Away:
Marcel Proust

Begins January 6, 2027

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

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