Magic Mountain Talks

danah boyd on the federal bureaucracy, in conversation with Colette Perold
2026-11-19 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Denver) | CO
danah boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and society, with an eye towards how structural inequities shape and are shaped by sociotechnical systems. Her upcoming book Data are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census is an ethnography of the US Census Bureau, Jenga politics, and the struggle to make democracy’s data. She has also conducted research on media manipulation, privacy practices, social media, and teen culture. Her monograph It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens has received widespread praise. She founded the research institute Data & Society, where she currently serves as an advisor. She is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University, a fellow of AAAS, a non-residential fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a trustee of the Computer History Museum, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the advisory board of Electronic Privacy Information Center. Previously, she worked at Microsoft Research. She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brown University, a master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Ph.D in Information from the University of California, Berkeley.

Colette Perold researches the relationship between media technologies, labor and U.S. foreign policy, specifically the ways in which multinational IT companies shape U.S. foreign policy priorities in Latin America. Her current project draws from the business history of computing and political economy of media industries to analyze the relationship between the U.S.-based IT sector and U.S. foreign policy in Brazil prior to modern computing. Her research has been funded by various sources including the Hagley Library, the Tinker Foundation, and the Charles Babbage Institute, where she received the 2019-2020 Tomash Fellowship. She most recently received the 2022-2023 Brooke Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Society for the History of Technology.

Fred Moten on the undercommons, in conversation with Umniya Najaer
2026-10-22 18:00 - 20:00 | CO
Fred Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics and critical theory. He works with lots of social and aesthetic study groups including Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Moved by the Motion, the Institute of Physical Sociality and the Harris/Moten Quartet.

Umniya Najaer is the 2025–2026 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Ethnic Studies and the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS). She is an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar who draws on Black Studies theories in conjunction with literary, archival, and social science methodologies to illuminate urgent socio-political issues. Grounded in the thought of Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter, Dr. Najaer’s current book project investigates alternate epistemologies and non-homogenizing metanarratives of the human. Her in-progress manuscript, Sylvia Wynter and Black Study: Experiments in Metasystemic Inquiry and Transcalar Reworlding, offers a conceptual toolkit for future scholars to engage Wynter on her own terms.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard on collective courage, in conversation with Júlia Martins Rodrigues
2026-09-17 18:00 - 20:00 | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
Jessica Gordon Nembhard is an internationally recognized political economist specializing in community economic development, solidarity economics, cooperative economics, Black Political Economy, racial wealth inequality, community-based approaches to justice, and popular economic literacy. She is Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies, at John Jay CUNY. She’s also the Director of John Jay’s McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program; former Chair of the Department of Africana Studies; former chair of the Malcolm/King Student Leadership Committee; and inaugural Chair of the John Jay Faculty Senate Committee on Racial Justice and Inclusion. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard is an affiliate faculty member for John Jay’s Economics Masters Program; and for the Environmental Psychology Ph.D. Program (in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences), CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (Pennsylvania State University Press 2014 and 2024), and 2016 inductee into the U.S. Cooperative Hall of Fame.

Júlia Martins Rodrigues, PhD, is a Research Associate and the Associate Director of the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her areas of expertise include cooperative law, multi-stakeholder cooperative networks, shared ownership and collective governance. Júlia earned her PhD in Legal and Social Sciences from the Università Degli Studi di Camerino, Italy. She also holds a Master of Law in Human Rights and Innovation from the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil, where she received her Juris Doctor and served as an Assistant Professor of Law. Additionally, she has obtained a professional certificate as a “Third Sector Operator: Serving Nonprofit Causes & Communities” from the Bottega del Terzo Settore in Ascoli Piceno, Italy. As a Latin woman born and raised in Brazil, she is dedicated to advancing economic democracy and social justice, viewing both as essential pathways to achieving shared prosperity and sustainability.

Francesca Wade on Gertrude Stein’s afterlife, in conversation with Claire Kelley
2026-08-20 18:00 - 20:00 | CO
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020) and Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (2025). She has held fellowships at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere.

Claire Kelley is a library specialist substitute at the Boulder Public Library, a contributor to Library Journal, and works in book publishing, currently at Seven Stories Press.

Amia Srinivasan on politics and psychoanalysis, in conversation with Hermione Hoby
2026-07-16 18:00 - 20:00 | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
Amia Srinivasan is a philosopher and author noted for her work in epistemology and feminist philosophy. She is Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury 2021) and a contributing editor of the London Review of Books.

Hermione Hoby is the author of the novels Neon in Daylight, which was twice listed as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Virtue, which was shortlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature award. She is a 2024 Macdowell Fellow in Literature and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Raised in London, she lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Jeff Sharlet on our slow civil war, in conversation with Nathan Schneider
2026-06-18 18:00 - 20:00 | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
Jeff Sharlet is the New York Times bestselling author or editor of eight books. His latest is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (2023), a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Nonfiction, one of The New York Times 100 Books of the Year, and a New Republic book of the year. In 2020, he published This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers. “Gorgeous,” says The New York Times, “[t]he book ingeniously reminds us that all of our lives — our struggles, desires, grief — happen concurrently with everyone else’s, and this awareness helps dissolve the boundaries between us.” Sharlet’s other books include Sweet Heaven When I Die, C Street, The Family — the basis for a 2019 Netflix documentary series, The Family, of which he is narrator and executive producer — and, with Peter Manseau, Killing the Buddha;and two edited volumes, Radiant Truths, and (with Manseau) Believer, Beware. His writing on Russia’s anti-LGBTQ crusade earned the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and his writing on anti-LGBT campaigns in Uganda earned the Molly Ivins Prize and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission’s Outspoken Award, among others. He has also been the recipient of numerous fellowships from MacDowell. Sharlet is an editor-at-large for VQR, and is or has been a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, Harper’s and Rolling Stone, and a contributor to publications including The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Mother Jones, Bookforum, and others. At Dartmouth College, he is the publisher of 40 Towns and is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing.

Nathan Schneider is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab. His most recent book is Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life.

Co-sponsored by CU Boulder’s Center for Media, Religion, and Culture.

Paul Reitter on translating Marx's Capital, in conversation with Arne Höcker
2026-05-21 12:00 - 14:00 | CO
Paul Reitter is Professor in German Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton, 2012), and The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (Chicago, 2008). He collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann on The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. For his translation of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy (Princeton University Press, 2024) he won the 2025 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Price from the Goethe Institute.

Arne Höcker is Associate Professor of German Studies at CU Boulder. His publications include The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka (Cornell UP 2020), and Paranoia and the Totalitarian Drift of Modernity (forthcoming 2026).

Alyssa Battistoni on capitalism and the politics of nature, in conversation with Benjamin Kunkel
2026-04-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
Alyssa Battistoni is a professor of political science at Barnard College. She is the author of Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton UP 2025) and co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019). She works and teaches on climate and environmental politics, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, and other topics in modern social and political theory.

Benjamin Kunkel is the bestselling author of Indecisionand Utopia or Bust, and a co-founder of n+1. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.

Tony Tulathimutte on gender and comedy in fiction, in conversation with Hermione Hoby
2026-03-19 18:00 - 20:00 | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
Tony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens and Rejection, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. He’s received a Whiting Award and an O. Henry Award, and has written for The Paris Review, N+1, The New York Times, The Nation, and others. He also runs CRIT, a writing class in Brooklyn.

Hermione Hoby is the author of the novels Neon in Daylight, which was twice listed as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and Virtue, which was shortlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature award. She is a 2024 Macdowell Fellow in Literature and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Raised in London, she lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Perry Anderson on World War I and the present international crisis, in conversation with Tony Wood
2026-02-19 18:00 - 20:00 | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
Perry Anderson is the author of, among other books, Spectrum, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Considerations on Western Marxism, English Questions, The Origins of Postmodernity, and The New Old World. He taught History at UCLA for thirty years and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.

Tony Wood is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder and a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review. He is author of Chechnya: The Case for Independence (2007), Russia without Putin: Money, Power, and the Myths of the New Cold War (2018) and, most recently, Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America (2026).

Rachel Kushner on aesthetics and politics, in conversation with Benjamin Kunkel
2026-01-22 18:00 - 20:00 | Trident Booksellers & Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder, CO, 80302, United States
Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels CREATION LAKE, THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K, and THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and her nonfiction in Harpers and the New York Times Magazine.

Benjamin Kunkel is the bestselling author of Indecision and Utopia or Bust, and a co-founder of n+1. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.
