David Brinkman
October 2026
Author Nathaniel Philbrick on the California Gold Rush
National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, discusses his new book, The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World.
September 2026
Above the Fray? Rethinking the Supreme Court Independence
What the Supreme Court ever what we thought it was?
May 2026
BIRDING IS BOOMING: with young and old alike
Everybody notices birds. But how many of us are birders?
Right now, birding is one of the fastest‑growing communities in America.
And something unexpected is fueling that growth.
May 2026
THE END OF LONELINESS? AI AND THE FUTURE OF CONNECTION
Can an AI companion provide the connection people crave?
April 2026
WHAT IS COLLEGE FOR TODAY?
College once offered a clear path to opportunity and civic life. Today, that path is shifting fast — squeezed by rising costs, AI’s impact on work, and political battles over the mission of higher education. Nicole Lynn Lewis and Susan Blum join moderator Anya Kamenetz to ask: What is college for now, and who is being left behind?
April 2026
Can Democracy Survive the Data Economy? Privacy, Power, and the Right to Dissent
The data‑broker economy has quietly become a powerful surveillance engine for federal agencies and law enforcement. This conversation asks a pressing question: when dissent is recorded, classified, and stored, can democracy survive?
March 2026
FREEDOM LOST, FREEDOM WON: American History Through a Black Family’s Story
The American story is often packaged as a linear climb toward a “more perfect union”. But for many Black families, history feels less like a ladder and more like a pendulum—swinging between hard‑won breakthroughs and the inevitable backlashes that follow. Join Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and commentator Eugene Robinson for an exploration of this rhythmic history.
February 2026
THE MEDICATED APPETITE: How GLP‑1s Are Reshaping the Food System
GLP‑1 medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro are reshaping how Americans think about appetite, health, and the food around us. What happens when medication becomes one of the most effective ways to navigate a food system built around overconsumption? How might these drugs change what we eat, how companies design and sell food?
February 2026
SKATING ON THIN ICE
As climate changes accelerate and global power dynamics shift, the Arctic is emerging as one of the most strategically contested regions on earth. Greenland now sits at the center of a geopolitical chess game involving the U.S, China, Russia, and Europe.
January 2026
AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES: WHO IS IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT?
Will driverless technology impact and reshape our identity and urban existence in ways we have not considered? In our car-centric culture, are the promises of convenience and safety of the autonomous car worth the price we may pay in terms of personal privacy?
December 2025
RESISTING ERASURE: The role of Indigenous People in American Identity
Even as Indigenous knowledge and ways of life have been borrowed and celebrated by mainstream culture, Native peoples have faced dispossession, exclusion and erasure. How, despite all efforts to eradicate them over the centuries, have Indigenous communities continued to survive and exercise their sovereignty and sacred cultural ways?
December 2025
WHAT ARE WE UP TO IN SPACE?
Two astrophysicists provide a reality check on our current role in space, to consider what is really motivating our actions, driving our expensive excursions to Mars, and shaping our international satellite placement industry. Have we really considered our role, responsibility, and stewardship in space alongside the potential profits to be made?
November 2025
BUILDING HOPE IN CYNICAL TIMES
Cambridge Forum speaks with three individuals – a pastor, an author and a professor of mass-media, who have all forged strategies to navigate the stresses of everyday existence. Their experiences offer pragmatic suggestions, and optimistic ideas about how meaning can be reclaimed in a cynical age.
November 2025
Democracy or whatever – can humor help?
CF asks three people from different areas of expertise to discuss the power behind the politics of ridicule. Different formats are used by both the Right and Left, not just to entertain, but to demonize, distract and derail debate. But what does this humor reveal about the state of our democracy – and is laughter our last best defense?
October 2025
BIG CARS – at what cost?
Big cars dominate our lives and we just love the personal comfort and distraction afforded by the gadgets behind the wheel. But for how long can we ignore the true costs of our driving habits on others and the planet, without paying the price?
September 2025
A.I. and the Death of Critical Thinking
Until we know more about the cognitive effects of technology like ChatGPT, should we be inserting it into the classroom? And if, as recent studies indicate, it homogenizes thinking and creativity, are we content to let our kids’ education go into experimental free fall?
June 2025
The Life and Legacy of Malcolm X
One hundred years after his birth and sixty years after his untimely death, Malcolm X still haunts the American consciousness. Mark Whitaker has put together a full and intriguing picture of the man’s life and legacy in The Afterlife of Malcolm X.
May 2025
CLAMOR: How Noise Took Over
Do you long for a quieter world? Science and education journalist Chris Berdik’s latest book is CLAMOR: How Noise Took Over and How We Can Take It Back.
May 2025
OUTCLASSED
Joan C. Williams, Professor of Law at UC San Francisco, discusses her book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Get Them Back. Williams sends out an urgent wake-up call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races, that is driving politics to the far right in America.
May 2025
Carbon: The Book of Life
Paul Hawken’s latest book, Carbon: The Book of Life illuminates the subtle connections between carbon and our collective human experience and suggests we see nature, carbon, and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined -inseparably connected.
April 2025
DEMONIZING THE TRUTH
President Trump has spent years demonizing the press, popularizing the concept of “fake news” and branding journalists the “enemy of the people”.
How far are ordinary Americans willing to go to acquiesce or protest these developments? Demonizing the Truth features David Enrich, business investigations editor for NYT and author of a new book, MURDERING THE TRUTH: Fear, the First Amendment, And A Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.
April 2025
RIGHTING WRONGS
Kenneth Roth—former executive director of Human Rights Watch will discuss his new book Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments with Mathias Risse—Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs and Philosophy and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University.
March 2025
Abundance: What progress takes
ABUNDANCE: What Progress Takes – a conversation between Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson at First Parish Church on March 19 at 7 pm – the event is sold out but we are recording the audio thanks to our partnership with Harvard Book Store. The podcast will be available shortly after […]
March 2025
MONEY, LIES AND GOD
Why have so many Americans turned against democracy? How did we get to the point where an organized political movement within the U.S. is working to bring down its own democratic system? These are the questions that journalist Katherine Stewart grapples with, in her new NYT bestselling book, Money, Lies and God.
March 2025
The Moving Image: A Force to Be Reckoned With
Americans now get their news and information from screens and video platforms rather than the “printed” word. The growing impact of this “force” in our society has no precedent in history.
February 2025
DISASTER NATIONALISM: is it the downfall of liberal civilization?
Are we on the brink of a new and irreversible epoch; one that signals the end of democratic civilization as we have known it? Richard Seymour discusses his latest book, Disaster Nationalism, and analyzes the roots, influencers and threats that this global shift poses.
February 2025
LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF OUR FATHERS
Omo Moses‘s book, The White Peril, is a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational family memoir, an epic father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience. Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather’s sermons and the writings of his father, the civil rights activist Robert P. Moses.
January 2025
ARE WE READY FOR THE NEXT PANDEMIC?
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, infectious disease specialist and global health physician and Crawford Kilian, science and health reporter, address the looming public health crisis and discuss the best ways forward.
December 2024
Feeding The Machine
Cambridge Forum continues its investigation into the impact of AI: Servant or Master? with FEEDING THE MACHINE. The proliferation of A.I. offers seemingly limitless implications for the future, however what is less known about, is the hidden human cost of the labor that feeds this machine—and it is horrific.
December 2024
Monumental Graffiti – and the role of public art
What is graffiti – is it vandalism, ornament or art? Anthropologist, Rafael Schacter proposes that we think of it as a monument – and it is indeed an ancient phenomenon. Originally thought to have come from the Italian archaeological term Graffito, meaning a deliberate mark made by scratching or engraving on a large surface such […]
November 2024
THE ANXIOUS i-GENERATION
“We are over-protecting children in the real world while under-protecting them online” says Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, who maintains that the environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development. Haidt traces the current mental health crisis to the mid-2010s when smartphones and social […]
November 2024
UNMASKING AI:
Scientist and artist, Dr. Joy Buolamwini discusses her book UNMASKING AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines. In it, she uncovers what she calls “the coded gaze”, evidence of encoded racial and gender bias, discrimination and exclusion in tech products.
November 2024
Orwell, 1984, etc.
Cambridge Forum is pleased to mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of 1984 with an in-depth discussion about George Orwell’s life, work, and legacy.
October 2024
The Art of Power: A Conversation with Nancy Pelosi
Cambridge Forum is delighted to partner with Harvard Book Store to bring you a conversation with Nancy Pelosi about The Art of Power, which chronicles her life as America’s first female Speaker of the House.