Beau Willimon arrived in Chautauqua Institution at 2 a.m. Saturday fresh from Washington, D.C., and two episodes into production on the fourth season of “House of Cards.” If he was exhausted during his lecture Saturday, it didn’t show.
Photographs by RUBY WALLAU | Staff Photographer A dark room, two chairs and a table he bought himself. That’s all…
David Simon was never promoted throughout his entire 12-year career as a crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun. He shared his theory on career advancement with the Amphitheater crowd at his lecture Monday night: “Stay in one spot until you outlast everybody.”
But it was all that time spent as a crime reporter that would influence his later work, both his nonfiction books and his successful TV shows, such as HBO’s “The Wire.”
In the eyes of Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Americans take their freedom for granted. As he spoke to the Chautauquans packed in and around the Hall of Philosophy at 3:30 p.m. Monday, he drew upon history and tradition to illustrate how vital it is that Americans engage in the discussion of freedom.
He admitted that in his younger years, he thought democracy could be given like a gift. He joked that some people think they can introduce democracy to a country, wipe their hands and say goodbye, and then democracy will be magically “installed.”
Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, wowed his audience during an exclusive three-day lecture seminar from July 1 to July 3.
Abraham Lincoln was a Christian president, and he embedded Christian ethics of inclusivity, humility and reconciliation within his speeches, writings and presidency, said Ronald C. White Jr., the author of A. Lincoln: A Biography and Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. White presented Monday’s 2 p.m. Interfaith Lecture in the Hall of Philosophy.
White opened this season’s Week Nine religion lecture theme, “The Ethics of Presidential Power,” with a lecture titled “Abraham Lincoln’s Sermon on the Mount: the Second Inaugural Address.”
White began his lecture with a reading of the 701-word document, which only took Lincoln six minutes to read to an audience of 25,000 to 30,000 people on March 4, 1865. At the time the president delivered the speech, the crowd was full of soldiers who had lost limbs during the Civil War, family members who had lost sons and brothers, White said. The atmosphere was turbulent, and already there were threats of Lincoln’s assassination or abduction. Nearby rooftops were strewn with sharpshooters, White said.
The last time Dan Brown spoke in the state of New York, he fell under scrutiny for the controversial topics that he explores in his novel The Da Vinci Code. Seven years later, Brown was the one leading the scrutiny.
“What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening?”
If the average Chautauquan didn’t know the answer to this riddle, he would have been punished by the plague in Sophocles’ play “Oedipus the King.” What he also probably didn’t know was that this riddle highlights an “eternal triangle” of art, religion and politics.
The Chautauquan Daily 