Previously on Tuesday Talks
A Monthly Virtual Speaker Series Featuring Some of Our Neighborhood’s Most Fascinating Residents.
March 11, 2025
David Plotz, Founder & CEO
City Cast DC: “What Happened to Local News?”
In conversation with Amanda Ripley
Ever wonder what has happened to local news coverage? We see less and less of it in our major newspaper. The DCist has disappeared. So have the Northwest Current and other freebies. With all the upheaval nationally, now is a good time to engage in our local community.
David Plotz will talk about his journey in founding a podcast for local news. David is founder and CEO of City Cast (www.citycast.fm), a network of 13 daily local news podcasts and newsletters, including the podcast City Cast DC and the newsletter Hey DC. Plotz was named Adweek’s Podcast Innovator of the Year in 2023 for his work on City Cast. He also co-hosts the popular weekly Slate Political Gabfest. From 2014 to 2020, Plotz was the first CEO of Atlas Obscura. From 2008 to 2014, Plotz was Editor-in-Chief of Slate. He’s the author of two books, one about the Bible, the other about a sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners.
David will be in conversation with journalist Amanda Ripley. Amanda began her career in local news, covering the courts and crime for Washington City Paper, before going on to Time magazine. She is a New York Times bestselling author and a Washington Post contributing columnist.
November 2024
November 12, 2024
Amanda Ripley, Author and Columnist
Who Survives When Disaster Strikes. And Why.
At the Cleveland Park Library
As a journalist, Amanda Ripley follows people who have been through a transformation to see what we can learn from them. These efforts have resulted in three award-winning, nonfiction books about different subjects: High Conflict, The Smartest Kids in the World which inspired a documentary, and The Unthinkable which became a PBS documentary on who survives disasters and why.
Her revised version of The Unthinkable, updated to include the pandemic and the role of social media and distrust in disaster response, was published just a few months ago. In it, she reveals how human fear circuits and crowd dynamics work, why our instincts sometime misfire in modern calamities, and how we can do much better.
Amanda Ripley’s journalism career began with covering courts and crime for Washington City Paper. She then spent 10 years with Time Magazine in various cities. She is a New York Times bestselling author, a Washington Post contributing columnist, and has written on wide-ranging topics like what Congress can learn from a former gang leader, the 3 ingredients missing from the news, and the untold story of Afghan women who hunted the Taliban.
She is the co-founder of Good Conflict, a media and training
company that helps people reimagine conflict. Amanda lives in Woodley Park and coaches soccer. Amanda will be in conversation with Karen Marsh, director of the Analysis and Capacity Division at FEMA. Karen works with state, local, tribal, and territorial partners to improve emergency management capabilities. She also created FEMA’s popular PrepTalks video series.
Washington, D.C., May 21, 2019. (photo by Allison Shelley)
October 15, 2024
Susan Stamberg. Broadcast Journalist. In conversation with Linda Winslow
NPR is Good for Women. And Men.
Susan Stamberg along with Linda Wertheimer, Nina Totenberg, and the late Cokie Roberts, were The Founding Mothers of National Public Radio. Susan will speak about her experiences in the early days at NPR – she joined at its inception in 1971 — and how radio news has changed since then.
Susan, who lives in Woodley Park, was the first woman to anchor a national nightly news program and served as co-host of the award-winning All Things Considered for 14 years before hosting Weekend Edition Sunday. She has hosted series on PBS, narrated performances at symphony orchestras, and her voice appeared on Broadway in the play An American Daughter. Susan has conducted thousands of memorable interviews, and who doesn’t know about the famous cranberry relish? She has won every major award in broadcasting and is in the Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the Radio Hall of Fame. Susan remains a special correspondent for NPR, reporting on cultural issues.
Susan was in conversation with Linda Winslow, from Cleveland Park, former executive producer of the PBS NewsHour from 2005 to 2014. Linda spent her career working for various PBS news programs. She met the legendary anchor team of Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer working on the PBS coverage of the Senate Watergate Committee hearings and later became one of the original producers of the half-hour “MacNeil/Lehrer Report.” Linda briefly left the MacNeil/Lehrer team in 1978 to become Vice President for News and Public Affairs at WETA-TV in Washington, DC. In that capacity, she sought to create programs that showcased both public television and public radio reporters. And that is how she met Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie.
Tuesday Talks September 2024
September 17, 2024, 7 pm
Suprabha Amy Beckjord
Owner, Transcendence-Perfection-Bliss of the Beyond
Adventures in Self-Transcendence
Suprabha Beckjord has been a beloved presence in the Connecticut Avenue corridor since she opened her gift shop as “Visions of Beauty,” in 1983. It was located above the original Vace’s in what is now the dining room of Laredo Restaurant. After that part of the block was sold, she moved her shop into the former Christian Science Reading Room, next to the Uptown Theatre, just a block from her original location. Sri Chinmoy, who has been her spiritual teacher since 1983, came to Washington, DC, in 1984, to attend an event at Congress. Afterwards, he visited Suprabha’s shop and while there, suggested a new name for it: Transcendence-Perfection-Bliss of the Beyond. The store became a neighborhood favorite – a colorful oasis in the midst of the cacophony of the city. Sadly, it closed its doors in mid-July 2024.
Sri Chinmoy inspired his students not only to meditate but to be active and fit. Suprabha began running in the mid-1980s and became one of the most prolific multi-day ultra-distance runners on the planet. In 1986, she ran a 200-mile race and ended up coming in first for women, and second place overall. After that victory she joined longer and longer races and finally ran the world’s longest foot race, the 3100-mile Self-Transcendence Race, not just once, but for 13 consecutive years, from 1997 to 2009.
Suprabha was conversation with Cassandra Hetherington, Director of Cleveland Park Main Street.
May 14, 2024, 7 pm
Mark Leibovich, Journalist and Author
“What Could Possibly Go Wrong? The 2024 Elections”
Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic, known for wicked satire in his profiles of public figures, will provide a lively discussion of the forthcoming fall elections, Fasten your seat belts! He will be in conversation with his Atlantic colleague, Franklin Foer.Mark is the author of five books, including three New York Times best sellers, and two No. 1 Times best sellers, This Town (2013) and Thank You for Your Servitude (2022). He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for profile writing. Before joining The Atlantic in 2022, he spent 16 years at The New York Times, based in Washington, serving as the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. Prior to that, he worked at The Washington Post, where he covered technology and national politics. He is also a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC.
April 9, 2024, 7pm
Franklin Foer “The Last Politician: Inside the Biden White House”
Journalist and author Franklin Foer grew up in Washington. He was editor of The New Republic and now is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His most recent book, The Last Politician: Inside the Biden White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, is a New York Times bestseller. With exclusive access to Biden’s inner circle of advisors and more than 300 interviews between November 2020 and February 2023, Frank Foer thoroughly chronicles the first two years of Biden’s presidency.
Foer’s previous books include World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, How Soccer Explains the World, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America, and with Marc Tracy, Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame.
The Last Politician will be available for sale in the library lobby at 6:30, and Frank Foer will be on hand to sign books.
March 19, 2024
Dennis Romano, Emeritus Professor of History, Syracuse University:
“Venice and Water”
Located in a tidal lagoon at the northern extreme of the Adriatic Sea, Venice has always had a fraught relationship with its surrounding waters. With no easy access to fresh water, the Venetians were forced to develop ingenious methods to supply their city with drinking water. So too Venice both benefited from and was imperiled by its watery locale. The sea and the rivers that flow into the lagoon offered defensive security and vital trade routes, but simultaneously threatened to flood the city with seawater or transform the lagoon into a malaria-ridden swamp. This talk traces Venice’s history by examining its four ages of water, as water has evolved in Venetian minds from a benefit to a problem to be solved, from an obstacle to be overcome, to an existential threat.
Dennis Romano is the Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marion Gruber Professor of History emeritus at Syracuse University. A former Guggenheim fellow, he has also held fellowships at the National Gallery of Art, the National Humanities Center, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is the author of several books on Venetian history, including The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373-1457 and his most recent work: Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City, just published this year.
February 20, 2024
Lance Kramer, DC Independent Filmmaker: “Navigating the Political Divide”
In person at the Cleveland Park Library. Free but registration is required:: https://clevelandwoodleypark.helpfulvillage.com/events/2198
Lance Kramer is a DC-based filmmaker and, with his brother Brandon, cofounder of Meridian Hill Pictures. Lance will discuss their films which focus on making meaningful change in these divisive times. These are personal stories of people attempting to address complex societal issues through bipartisanship, the navigation of differences, and the finding of common ground. The talk will be interspersed with video clips from their films.
Lance produced The First Step (Tribeca, AFI Docs), City of Trees (Full Frame, PBS, Netflix), and the Webby Award-winning documentary series The Messy Truth. Lance was selected to the 2018 Sundance Creative Producers Summit, the 2017 Impact Partners Documentary Producers Fellowship and was named to the DOC NYC “40 Under 40” list in 2021. He was awarded four Individual Arts Fellowships by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities between 2014-2022. In 2014, Lance received the DC Mayor’s Arts Award, the highest honor given to working artists in the city. Lance has served two terms as Board Member of Docs in Progress, and has been an active member of the Documentary Producers Alliance since 2016. Lance holds a bachelor’s degree in history and film from Dartmouth College.
Photo by Linda Maraniss
November 14, 2023
“Jim Thorpe”: David Maraniss, journalist and editor
In person at the Cleveland Park Library- No Recording
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History). His latest book, Path Lit By Lightning, is about the life of the renowned Native American Olympian James Francis Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, who won two gold medals for the US at the 1912 Summer Games.
October 17, 2023
“The Cleveland Park Spy”: Jim Popkin
In-person at the Cleveland Park Library, No Recording
Jim Popkin will discuss his new book, Code Name Blue Wren, about convicted Cuban spy Ana Montes, who used to live on Macomb Street in Cleveland Park. Popkin is an author and investigative journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, WIRED, and on NPR. He ran the NBC News Investigative Unit, where he was a Senior Producer and on-air correspondent. He reported for NBC News for 14 years for the TODAY Show, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and CNBC. Popkin won four national Emmy Awards for outstanding journalism, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, the George Polk Award, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. He received a BA from Northwestern University and a Master’s from Yale Law School.
Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy – and the Sister She Betrayed was released this past January, just three days before Montes was freed from prison after more than two decades behind bars.
Code Name Blue Wren will be available for sale in the library lobby, and Jim Popkin will be on hand to sign books.
September 19, 2023
Linda Wertheimer in conversation with Linda Winslow: NPR Women Rule!
In person at the Cleveland Park Library, no recording
Nationally renowned broadcast journalist Linda Wertheimer, along with Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg and the late Cokie Roberts, were Founding Mothers of National Public Radio. Linda will speak about her experiences in the early days at NPR – she joined at its inception in 1971 — and how radio news has changed since then.
Linda Wertheimer, who lives in Cleveland Park, was also host of All Things Considered for 13 years and was its first director. From 1974-1989, she provided award-wining coverage of national politics and Congress. She traveled the country with presidential candidates, reported from Congress on major events from Watergate to the Reagan Revolution to Iran-Contra. Linda was the first woman to anchor network coverage of a presidential nomination convention and election night and continued to do so for 10 conventions and 8 congressional elections. She also was the first person to broadcast live from inside the US Senate Chamber, and her 37 days of coverage of the Senate Panama Canal Treaty debates won a special DuPont-Columbia University award, one of many awards she has garnered over the years. She is an author, and her 1995 book, Listening to America: 25 Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio, celebrates NPR’s history. In 2002, Linda was named senior national correspondent.
Tonight they will be in conversation with Linda Winslow, former executive producer of the PBS NewsHour from 2005 to 2014.
Linda spent her career working for various PBS news programs. She met the legendary anchor team of Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer working on the PBS coverage of the Senate Watergate Committee hearings and later became one of the original producers of the half-hour “MacNeil/Lehrer Report.” Linda briefly left the MacNeil/Lehrer team in 1978 to become Vice President for News and Public Affairs at WETA-TV in Washington, DC. In that capacity, she sought to create programs that showcased both public television and public radio reporters. And that is how she met Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie.
May 9, 2023
Joe Alonso: Head Mason. National Cathedral “View from the Top”
In-person at the Cleveland Park Library, No Recording
Joe Alonso came to the Cathedral in 1985 as a young journeyman stonemason to work on the final phase of the Cathedral’s construction, the West Towers, with its Gothic arches and intricate tracery. In a ceremony attended by 20,000 people and President George H.W. Bush on September 29, 1990, he set the final stone on the Southwest Tower. It was 83 years to the day that President Teddy Roosevelt set the foundation stone for the Cathedral. Joe became the Cathedral’s Head Mason and worked on the preservation and maintenance of its stone fabric. Joe was one of the first people to enter the Cathedral after the earthquake of August 2011. The extensive damage from that event signaled a return to construction and reconstruction mode, a task that has lasted for nearly 12 years.
Joe provided illustrated brief history of the construction of the Cathedral, including the years of construction, restoration, stone carving, and the earthquake damage and repairs.
Washington Post writer David Ignatius in Washington, DC on Sept 27, 2017
March 21, 2023 | 7PM
David Ignatius, Editor, Columnist, and Novelist
ESPIONAGE & TECHNOLOGY
In-person at the Cleveland Park Library – No Recording
DC native and Cleveland Park resident David Ignatius joined The Washington Post in 1986 after reporting for the Wall Street Journal. Since 1988, he has written a twice-weekly foreign affairs column. He has won numerous awards and supervised the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
David also has written 11 spy novels, most recently The Palladin. Another novel, Body of Lies, was made into a movie in 2008. Espionage and technology is the subject of his three most recent novels and another that is in progress.
February 21, 2023 | IN PERSON AT THE CLEVELAND PARK LIBRARY – No Recording
Mark Bucher, Founder, Feed the Fridge, Co-owner, Medium Rare
ADDRESSING HUNGER IN DC
Mark Bucher is a successful restaurateur and a change maker At the beginning of the pandemic, he created Feed the Fridge to combat hunger in the metro region while helping struggling restaurants stay in business. Bucher installs refrigerators at recreation centers and schools in the region’s food deserts and pays local restaurants to stock them with up to 100 freshly prepared meals every day. Those meals are available to anyone who’s hungry. Feed the Fridge has served more than 7 million meals to those dealing with food insecurity. It also provided much-needed baby formula during the recent shortage.
January 17, 2023 | IN PERSON AT THE CLEVELAND PARK LIBRARY – No Recording
In conjunction with the Cleveland Park Historical Society
Camilla Carpenter, Former Executive Director, Cleveland Park Historical Society
An Architectural History: Connecticut Avenue in Cleveland Park
Camilla Carpenter moved to Cleveland Park from New York City in 2000. Prior to her work with CPHS, Camilla spent most of her career in television, working at ABC News, Home Box Office, and Discovery Communications.
Camilla is an enthusiast of architectural history, and a big fan of the variety of architectural styles that enrich the neighborhood. She is a firm believer that historic buildings and streetscapes should be celebrated and provide us with a deeper understanding of how the past relates to our present built environment.
November 15, 2022
IN PERSON AT THE CLEVELAND PARK LIBRARY – No Recording
Peter Baker, Chief White House correspondent for The New York Times
Susan Glasser, Staff writer for The New Yorker
The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, a political analyst for MSNBC, and the author of Days of Fire and The Breach. Susan Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of its weekly “Letter from Trump’s Washington,” as well as a CNN global affairs analyst. Their first assignment as a married couple was as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, after which they wrote Kremlin Rising. They also coauthored The Man Who Ran Washington, a New York Times bestseller.
The Divider is the inside story of the four years when Donald Trump went to war with Washington, from the chaotic beginning to the violent finale – an ambitious and lasting history of the full Trump presidency that also contains dozens of exclusive scoops and stories from behind the scenes in the White House, from the absurd to the deadly serious.
October 18, 2022, Matt Wuerker, Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist at Politico, “If you’re not confused, you’re not thinking clearly: Political cartooning in our upside-down times.”
Watch Here: https://youtu.be/U19YrPTYXRo
Matt Wuerker was an original staff member at Politico where he is staff cartoonist and illustrator. He
has been awarded the National Press Foundation’s Berryman Prize, the Herblock Prize, and he received
the Pulitzer Prize in 2012.
Prior to joining Politico, he was a successful freelance cartoonist, illustrator, and animator. Over the past
40 years, his cartoons have been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines. His work is
syndicated internationally by Andrews McMeel Syndicate and the Cartoonist Group.
He is the former president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and serves on the board
of the Herblock Foundation, He is the president of the board for Cartoonist Rights Network
International.
September 20, 2022 – Judith Waxman, Historian, “A History of Woodley Park”
Watch the Event Here: https://youtu.be/E8GzOd7_dSk
Did you know that US Presidents lived in Woodley Park? That enslaved people lived here, though African Americans were prohibited from buying or renting residences? That the US Supreme Court played a role in shaping the Woodley neighborhood?
Register at: https://clevelandwoodleypark.helpfulvillage.com/events/1316
Judy Waxman is the unofficial historian of Woodley Park. In 2005, she led the Woodley Park team to rehabilitate the eight call boxes in the community. In 2015 she became an oral historian and has worked on projects including The DC Collaborative, The Women’s March, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association’s 50th Anniversary, the Veteran Feminists of America, and the Pioneer Histories Project.
Judy is also one of the nation’s leading healthcare law and policy analysts. She has consulted with hundreds of state and national organizations to improve the health of women and other vulnerable groups. She worked as a senior staff leader in health and reproductive rights policy at the
National Women’s Law Center, Families USA, the National Health Law Program, and the Department of Health and Human Services. From 1989-1991, she was a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care that created a universal health care plan that evolved into the Affordable Care Act. Starting in 2015, she taught Reproductive Health Policy and Law and a survey course on women’s health at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
February 15, 2022
Tamara Belt and Erin Gleeson: DC’s Nature & Ecology – The Impact of Climate Change & Urban Development
Tamara Belt an award-winning landscape designer and environmentalist and Erin Gleeson a hobby beekeeper who keeps an apiary of about 20 hives at the Swiss Embassy along with a friend.
Cleveland and Woodley Park’s location alongside hundreds of acres of parkland — Rock Creek Park, Tregaron, Rosedale, and more — provides unparalleled opportunities for urban residents to enjoy nature and wildlife in close proximity. Learn from neighborhood experts how climate change and urban development have affected ecology in our local gardens and wildlife.
Watch the Event here:
January 18, 2022
Ellen Prentiss Campbell – Listening to Ghosts, Conjuring Characters: Drawing from Life and Creating Fiction.
Author and psychotherapist Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s most recent novel Frieda’s Song was inspired by the life of renowned psychotherapist Frieda Fromm Reichmann who fled Nazi Germany in 1935 and practiced at the Chestnut Lodge in Rockville until her death in 1957, and by the fire which destroyed the Lodge in 2009. In conversation with writer Virginia Hartman, Campbell will discuss the uses of history, experience, and imagination in her fiction.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjwrXCTORdo
November 16, 2021
Jeffrey Rosen: The Future of the Supreme Court
Constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen, author of Conversations with RBG, will discuss the place of the Supreme Court in our federal system, its evolution over the years, the role it plays today, and the role it may play in the future.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF0y27-B0Qs
October 19, 2021, 7 pm
Terence Samuel: Changes in Journalism Over a Lifetime in the News
Terry Samuel, who has daily oversight of the newsgathering operation at NPR, will discuss how journalism has changed over the course of his career, from work at The Village Voice to The Root.com to newspapers in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.
From 2011 to 2017, Terry Samuel was a politics editor at The Washington Post, overseeing White House and congressional coverage, and before that he was the congressional Managing Editor at the National Journal. He began his career as a writing fellow at the Village Voice in New York and later was a reporter at The Roanoke Times & World News, a national correspondent at both The Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chief congressional correspondent at US News & World Report.
He was a director of editorial programming for AOL Black Voices before joining the Washington Post Company to help launch TheRoot.com in 2007.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m45z7xl9xrQ
September 21, 2021
Judith Heumann: Rolling Warrior and Fearless Advocate
As one of the leaders of the Disability Rights Movement, Judy (Judith) Heumann is no stranger to speaking up. Heumann will talk about her new book, Rolling Warrior, as well as her life and career.
Judith Heumann is a leading disability rights advocate who has worked with government agencies, NGOs, and other institutions to develop human rights legislation and policies benefiting children and adults with disabilities. Her new memoir for young readers, Rolling Warrior: The Incredible, Sometimes Awkward, True Story of a Rebel Girl on Wheels Who Helped Spark a Revolution came out in July, 2021.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u916b64YL5I&t=21s
May 18, 2021
Michelle Kayon: Behind-the-scenes at the National Cathedral
Michelle Kayon, Director of Facilities and Preservation, will discuss ongoing and future architectural projects, maintenance, and renovations at this iconic Washington landmark.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7JNmguIas8
April 20, 2021
Celebrating National Poetry Month with Gigi Bradford
Do you struggle finding meaning in poetry? Is it too artsy for you? Contemporary poetry has shucked off obligatory rhymes and obscurity. Poetry is more topical, urgent, and accessible than ever and speaks to our present cultural condition. Find out what the increased interest is about.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mQPQylrlgQ
(March Tuesday Talk is no longer online by request of the presenter)
February 23, 2021
Enraptured by Raptors: The Story of the Cleveland Park Hawks
Two Woodley Park residents –photographer and author Jennifer Packard, in conversation with Amy Henderson — on how a family of red-shouldered hawks found its way into the hearts of an urban community in the midst of uncertain times.
Watch the Event Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4HJIUNIEpU
January 19, 2021
A New Library for and of Cleveland Park
The design team for the library — Matthew Bell and Tim Bertschinger — discuss the new building from first concept to realization. In conversation with Brian Kelly.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTIYY8QB1ME&t=1s
November 17, 2020
Hot of the Presses! with Politico’s Jake Sherman
Jake Sherman is a senior writer for POLITICO and co-author of POLITICO’s Playbook, the nation’s leading political newsletter. He also is the co-author of New York Times and national best seller, “The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump’s America,” which was published by Crown in 2019. Jake is an NBC and MSNBC political contributor. Jake will talk about covering the 2020 election and his work thus far.
Watch the Event Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEzRG1IDmUE
October 20, 2020
It’s All Happening at the Zoo!
National Zoo animal keepers Kathryn Juliano and Amanda Bobyack will discuss conservation breeding with endangered species and elephant social dynamics and cognitive abilities. Kathryn Juliano is an animal keeper who works with large carnivores including lions, tigers, and Andean bears, among other animals. Amanda will describe how elephants in zoos help us understand social dynamics among related and non-related individuals as well as the elephants’ immense cognitive and emotional repertoire.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kga6XzDS5oY&t=3189s
September 22, 2020
Sandy Christenberry and George Hemphill: Celebrating the Pioneering Art of Bill Christenberry
Join us for a virtual discussion with Sandy Christenberry in conversation with George Hemphill. The pair will discuss the life and work of the renowned artist Bill Christenberry. Sandy is the former assistant dean of admissions a the Corcoran School of Art, where her late husband, Bill was a professor for the next forty years. Bill’s own work expressed his deep love of his native Alabama, notably Hale County made famous by James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Bill was a multi-faceted artist — painter, photographer, sculptor, story teller, and educator about the South, including that part which he abhorred – racism, as exemplified by the Ku Klux Klan. Bill was not only an internationally renowned artist but a beloved citizen of Cleveland Park where he and Sandy moved in 1972.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDZ86nYcG5o&t=13s
May 19, 2020
Juliet Eilperin in conversation with Charles Fishman
Juliet Eilperin has spent 15 years covering the environment at The Washington Post, a job that has taken her from the halls of Congress to a seat on Air Force One and the wilds of the Alaskan tundra. She will reflect on how policy, politics and science intersect when it comes to climate change, public lands, and a range of other issues that shape our planet.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rzLAQx4bAM
Up Next on Tuesday Talks
Check out the upcoming events below.
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Pulitzer-Prize Winning Journalist & Best-Selling Author Discusses The Triumph and Tragedy of the Legendary Jim Thorpe
Award-Winning Journalist Uncovers the Secret Life of a Spy in Cleveland Park
Legendary NPR Journalist Recounts a Storied Career of Broadcasting, Reporting and Politics
May 14, 2024, 7 pm
Mark Leibovich, Journalist and Author
“What Could Possibly Go Wrong? The 2024 Elections”
Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic, known for wicked satire in his profiles of public figures, will provide a lively discussion of the forthcoming fall elections, Fasten your seat belts! He will be in conversation with his Atlantic colleague, Franklin Foer.Mark is the author of five books, including three New York Times best sellers, and two No. 1 Times best sellers, This Town (2013) and Thank You for Your Servitude (2022). He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for profile writing. Before joining The Atlantic in 2022, he spent 16 years at The New York Times, based in Washington, serving as the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. Prior to that, he worked at The Washington Post, where he covered technology and national politics. He is also a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC.
April 9, 2024, 7pm
Franklin Foer “The Last Politician: Inside the Biden White House”
Journalist and author Franklin Foer grew up in Washington. He was editor of The New Republic and now is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His most recent book, The Last Politician: Inside the Biden White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, is a New York Times bestseller. With exclusive access to Biden’s inner circle of advisors and more than 300 interviews between November 2020 and February 2023, Frank Foer thoroughly chronicles the first two years of Biden’s presidency.
Foer’s previous books include World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, How Soccer Explains the World, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America, and with Marc Tracy, Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame.
The Last Politician will be available for sale in the library lobby at 6:30, and Frank Foer will be on hand to sign books.
March 19, 2024
Dennis Romano, Emeritus Professor of History, Syracuse University:
“Venice and Water”
Located in a tidal lagoon at the northern extreme of the Adriatic Sea, Venice has always had a fraught relationship with its surrounding waters. With no easy access to fresh water, the Venetians were forced to develop ingenious methods to supply their city with drinking water. So too Venice both benefited from and was imperiled by its watery locale. The sea and the rivers that flow into the lagoon offered defensive security and vital trade routes, but simultaneously threatened to flood the city with seawater or transform the lagoon into a malaria-ridden swamp. This talk traces Venice’s history by examining its four ages of water, as water has evolved in Venetian minds from a benefit to a problem to be solved, from an obstacle to be overcome, to an existential threat.
Dennis Romano is the Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marion Gruber Professor of History emeritus at Syracuse University. A former Guggenheim fellow, he has also held fellowships at the National Gallery of Art, the National Humanities Center, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is the author of several books on Venetian history, including The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373-1457 and his most recent work: Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City, just published this year.
February 20, 2024
Lance Kramer, DC Independent Filmmaker: “Navigating the Political Divide”
In person at the Cleveland Park Library. Free but registration is required:: https://clevelandwoodleypark.helpfulvillage.com/events/2198
Lance Kramer is a DC-based filmmaker and, with his brother Brandon, cofounder of Meridian Hill Pictures. Lance will discuss their films which focus on making meaningful change in these divisive times. These are personal stories of people attempting to address complex societal issues through bipartisanship, the navigation of differences, and the finding of common ground. The talk will be interspersed with video clips from their films.
Lance produced The First Step (Tribeca, AFI Docs), City of Trees (Full Frame, PBS, Netflix), and the Webby Award-winning documentary series The Messy Truth. Lance was selected to the 2018 Sundance Creative Producers Summit, the 2017 Impact Partners Documentary Producers Fellowship and was named to the DOC NYC “40 Under 40” list in 2021. He was awarded four Individual Arts Fellowships by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities between 2014-2022. In 2014, Lance received the DC Mayor’s Arts Award, the highest honor given to working artists in the city. Lance has served two terms as Board Member of Docs in Progress, and has been an active member of the Documentary Producers Alliance since 2016. Lance holds a bachelor’s degree in history and film from Dartmouth College.
Photo by Linda Maraniss
November 14, 2023
“Jim Thorpe”: David Maraniss, journalist and editor
In person at the Cleveland Park Library- No Recording
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History). His latest book, Path Lit By Lightning, is about the life of the renowned Native American Olympian James Francis Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, who won two gold medals for the US at the 1912 Summer Games.
October 17, 2023
“The Cleveland Park Spy”: Jim Popkin
In-person at the Cleveland Park Library, No Recording
Jim Popkin will discuss his new book, Code Name Blue Wren, about convicted Cuban spy Ana Montes, who used to live on Macomb Street in Cleveland Park. Popkin is an author and investigative journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, WIRED, and on NPR. He ran the NBC News Investigative Unit, where he was a Senior Producer and on-air correspondent. He reported for NBC News for 14 years for the TODAY Show, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and CNBC. Popkin won four national Emmy Awards for outstanding journalism, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, the George Polk Award, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. He received a BA from Northwestern University and a Master’s from Yale Law School.
Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy – and the Sister She Betrayed was released this past January, just three days before Montes was freed from prison after more than two decades behind bars.
Code Name Blue Wren will be available for sale in the library lobby, and Jim Popkin will be on hand to sign books.
September 19, 2023
Linda Wertheimer in conversation with Linda Winslow: NPR Women Rule!
In person at the Cleveland Park Library, no recording
Nationally renowned broadcast journalist Linda Wertheimer, along with Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg and the late Cokie Roberts, were Founding Mothers of National Public Radio. Linda will speak about her experiences in the early days at NPR – she joined at its inception in 1971 — and how radio news has changed since then.
Linda Wertheimer, who lives in Cleveland Park, was also host of All Things Considered for 13 years and was its first director. From 1974-1989, she provided award-wining coverage of national politics and Congress. She traveled the country with presidential candidates, reported from Congress on major events from Watergate to the Reagan Revolution to Iran-Contra. Linda was the first woman to anchor network coverage of a presidential nomination convention and election night and continued to do so for 10 conventions and 8 congressional elections. She also was the first person to broadcast live from inside the US Senate Chamber, and her 37 days of coverage of the Senate Panama Canal Treaty debates won a special DuPont-Columbia University award, one of many awards she has garnered over the years. She is an author, and her 1995 book, Listening to America: 25 Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio, celebrates NPR’s history. In 2002, Linda was named senior national correspondent.
Tonight they will be in conversation with Linda Winslow, former executive producer of the PBS NewsHour from 2005 to 2014.
Linda spent her career working for various PBS news programs. She met the legendary anchor team of Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer working on the PBS coverage of the Senate Watergate Committee hearings and later became one of the original producers of the half-hour “MacNeil/Lehrer Report.” Linda briefly left the MacNeil/Lehrer team in 1978 to become Vice President for News and Public Affairs at WETA-TV in Washington, DC. In that capacity, she sought to create programs that showcased both public television and public radio reporters. And that is how she met Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie.
May 9, 2023
Joe Alonso: Head Mason. National Cathedral “View from the Top”
In-person at the Cleveland Park Library, No Recording
Joe Alonso came to the Cathedral in 1985 as a young journeyman stonemason to work on the final phase of the Cathedral’s construction, the West Towers, with its Gothic arches and intricate tracery. In a ceremony attended by 20,000 people and President George H.W. Bush on September 29, 1990, he set the final stone on the Southwest Tower. It was 83 years to the day that President Teddy Roosevelt set the foundation stone for the Cathedral. Joe became the Cathedral’s Head Mason and worked on the preservation and maintenance of its stone fabric. Joe was one of the first people to enter the Cathedral after the earthquake of August 2011. The extensive damage from that event signaled a return to construction and reconstruction mode, a task that has lasted for nearly 12 years.
Joe provided illustrated brief history of the construction of the Cathedral, including the years of construction, restoration, stone carving, and the earthquake damage and repairs.
Washington Post writer David Ignatius in Washington, DC on Sept 27, 2017
March 21, 2023 | 7PM
David Ignatius, Editor, Columnist, and Novelist
ESPIONAGE & TECHNOLOGY
In-person at the Cleveland Park Library – No Recording
DC native and Cleveland Park resident David Ignatius joined The Washington Post in 1986 after reporting for the Wall Street Journal. Since 1988, he has written a twice-weekly foreign affairs column. He has won numerous awards and supervised the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
David also has written 11 spy novels, most recently The Palladin. Another novel, Body of Lies, was made into a movie in 2008. Espionage and technology is the subject of his three most recent novels and another that is in progress.
February 21, 2023 | IN PERSON AT THE CLEVELAND PARK LIBRARY – No Recording
Mark Bucher, Founder, Feed the Fridge, Co-owner, Medium Rare
ADDRESSING HUNGER IN DC
Mark Bucher is a successful restaurateur and a change maker At the beginning of the pandemic, he created Feed the Fridge to combat hunger in the metro region while helping struggling restaurants stay in business. Bucher installs refrigerators at recreation centers and schools in the region’s food deserts and pays local restaurants to stock them with up to 100 freshly prepared meals every day. Those meals are available to anyone who’s hungry. Feed the Fridge has served more than 7 million meals to those dealing with food insecurity. It also provided much-needed baby formula during the recent shortage.
January 17, 2023 | IN PERSON AT THE CLEVELAND PARK LIBRARY – No Recording
In conjunction with the Cleveland Park Historical Society
Camilla Carpenter, Former Executive Director, Cleveland Park Historical Society
An Architectural History: Connecticut Avenue in Cleveland Park
Camilla Carpenter moved to Cleveland Park from New York City in 2000. Prior to her work with CPHS, Camilla spent most of her career in television, working at ABC News, Home Box Office, and Discovery Communications.
Camilla is an enthusiast of architectural history, and a big fan of the variety of architectural styles that enrich the neighborhood. She is a firm believer that historic buildings and streetscapes should be celebrated and provide us with a deeper understanding of how the past relates to our present built environment.
November 15, 2022
IN PERSON AT THE CLEVELAND PARK LIBRARY – No Recording
Peter Baker, Chief White House correspondent for The New York Times
Susan Glasser, Staff writer for The New Yorker
The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, a political analyst for MSNBC, and the author of Days of Fire and The Breach. Susan Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of its weekly “Letter from Trump’s Washington,” as well as a CNN global affairs analyst. Their first assignment as a married couple was as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, after which they wrote Kremlin Rising. They also coauthored The Man Who Ran Washington, a New York Times bestseller.
The Divider is the inside story of the four years when Donald Trump went to war with Washington, from the chaotic beginning to the violent finale – an ambitious and lasting history of the full Trump presidency that also contains dozens of exclusive scoops and stories from behind the scenes in the White House, from the absurd to the deadly serious.
October 18, 2022, Matt Wuerker, Pulitzer-Prize winning cartoonist at Politico, “If you’re not confused, you’re not thinking clearly: Political cartooning in our upside-down times.”
Watch Here: https://youtu.be/U19YrPTYXRo
Matt Wuerker was an original staff member at Politico where he is staff cartoonist and illustrator. He
has been awarded the National Press Foundation’s Berryman Prize, the Herblock Prize, and he received
the Pulitzer Prize in 2012.
Prior to joining Politico, he was a successful freelance cartoonist, illustrator, and animator. Over the past
40 years, his cartoons have been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines. His work is
syndicated internationally by Andrews McMeel Syndicate and the Cartoonist Group.
He is the former president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and serves on the board
of the Herblock Foundation, He is the president of the board for Cartoonist Rights Network
International.
September 20, 2022 – Judith Waxman, Historian, “A History of Woodley Park”
Watch the Event Here: https://youtu.be/E8GzOd7_dSk
Did you know that US Presidents lived in Woodley Park? That enslaved people lived here, though African Americans were prohibited from buying or renting residences? That the US Supreme Court played a role in shaping the Woodley neighborhood?
Register at: https://clevelandwoodleypark.helpfulvillage.com/events/1316
Judy Waxman is the unofficial historian of Woodley Park. In 2005, she led the Woodley Park team to rehabilitate the eight call boxes in the community. In 2015 she became an oral historian and has worked on projects including The DC Collaborative, The Women’s March, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association’s 50th Anniversary, the Veteran Feminists of America, and the Pioneer Histories Project.
Judy is also one of the nation’s leading healthcare law and policy analysts. She has consulted with hundreds of state and national organizations to improve the health of women and other vulnerable groups. She worked as a senior staff leader in health and reproductive rights policy at the
National Women’s Law Center, Families USA, the National Health Law Program, and the Department of Health and Human Services. From 1989-1991, she was a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care that created a universal health care plan that evolved into the Affordable Care Act. Starting in 2015, she taught Reproductive Health Policy and Law and a survey course on women’s health at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
February 15, 2022
Tamara Belt and Erin Gleeson: DC’s Nature & Ecology – The Impact of Climate Change & Urban Development
Tamara Belt an award-winning landscape designer and environmentalist and Erin Gleeson a hobby beekeeper who keeps an apiary of about 20 hives at the Swiss Embassy along with a friend.
Cleveland and Woodley Park’s location alongside hundreds of acres of parkland — Rock Creek Park, Tregaron, Rosedale, and more — provides unparalleled opportunities for urban residents to enjoy nature and wildlife in close proximity. Learn from neighborhood experts how climate change and urban development have affected ecology in our local gardens and wildlife.
Watch the Event here:
January 18, 2022
Ellen Prentiss Campbell – Listening to Ghosts, Conjuring Characters: Drawing from Life and Creating Fiction.
Author and psychotherapist Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s most recent novel Frieda’s Song was inspired by the life of renowned psychotherapist Frieda Fromm Reichmann who fled Nazi Germany in 1935 and practiced at the Chestnut Lodge in Rockville until her death in 1957, and by the fire which destroyed the Lodge in 2009. In conversation with writer Virginia Hartman, Campbell will discuss the uses of history, experience, and imagination in her fiction.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjwrXCTORdo
November 16, 2021
Jeffrey Rosen: The Future of the Supreme Court
Constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen, author of Conversations with RBG, will discuss the place of the Supreme Court in our federal system, its evolution over the years, the role it plays today, and the role it may play in the future.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF0y27-B0Qs
October 19, 2021, 7 pm
Terence Samuel: Changes in Journalism Over a Lifetime in the News
Terry Samuel, who has daily oversight of the newsgathering operation at NPR, will discuss how journalism has changed over the course of his career, from work at The Village Voice to The Root.com to newspapers in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.
From 2011 to 2017, Terry Samuel was a politics editor at The Washington Post, overseeing White House and congressional coverage, and before that he was the congressional Managing Editor at the National Journal. He began his career as a writing fellow at the Village Voice in New York and later was a reporter at The Roanoke Times & World News, a national correspondent at both The Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chief congressional correspondent at US News & World Report.
He was a director of editorial programming for AOL Black Voices before joining the Washington Post Company to help launch TheRoot.com in 2007.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m45z7xl9xrQ
September 21, 2021
Judith Heumann: Rolling Warrior and Fearless Advocate
As one of the leaders of the Disability Rights Movement, Judy (Judith) Heumann is no stranger to speaking up. Heumann will talk about her new book, Rolling Warrior, as well as her life and career.
Judith Heumann is a leading disability rights advocate who has worked with government agencies, NGOs, and other institutions to develop human rights legislation and policies benefiting children and adults with disabilities. Her new memoir for young readers, Rolling Warrior: The Incredible, Sometimes Awkward, True Story of a Rebel Girl on Wheels Who Helped Spark a Revolution came out in July, 2021.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u916b64YL5I&t=21s
May 18, 2021
Michelle Kayon: Behind-the-scenes at the National Cathedral
Michelle Kayon, Director of Facilities and Preservation, will discuss ongoing and future architectural projects, maintenance, and renovations at this iconic Washington landmark.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7JNmguIas8
April 20, 2021
Celebrating National Poetry Month with Gigi Bradford
Do you struggle finding meaning in poetry? Is it too artsy for you? Contemporary poetry has shucked off obligatory rhymes and obscurity. Poetry is more topical, urgent, and accessible than ever and speaks to our present cultural condition. Find out what the increased interest is about.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mQPQylrlgQ
(March Tuesday Talk is no longer online by request of the presenter)
February 23, 2021
Enraptured by Raptors: The Story of the Cleveland Park Hawks
Two Woodley Park residents –photographer and author Jennifer Packard, in conversation with Amy Henderson — on how a family of red-shouldered hawks found its way into the hearts of an urban community in the midst of uncertain times.
Watch the Event Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4HJIUNIEpU
January 19, 2021
A New Library for and of Cleveland Park
The design team for the library — Matthew Bell and Tim Bertschinger — discuss the new building from first concept to realization. In conversation with Brian Kelly.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTIYY8QB1ME&t=1s
November 17, 2020
Hot of the Presses! with Politico’s Jake Sherman
Jake Sherman is a senior writer for POLITICO and co-author of POLITICO’s Playbook, the nation’s leading political newsletter. He also is the co-author of New York Times and national best seller, “The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump’s America,” which was published by Crown in 2019. Jake is an NBC and MSNBC political contributor. Jake will talk about covering the 2020 election and his work thus far.
Watch the Event Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEzRG1IDmUE
October 20, 2020
It’s All Happening at the Zoo!
National Zoo animal keepers Kathryn Juliano and Amanda Bobyack will discuss conservation breeding with endangered species and elephant social dynamics and cognitive abilities. Kathryn Juliano is an animal keeper who works with large carnivores including lions, tigers, and Andean bears, among other animals. Amanda will describe how elephants in zoos help us understand social dynamics among related and non-related individuals as well as the elephants’ immense cognitive and emotional repertoire.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kga6XzDS5oY&t=3189s
September 22, 2020
Sandy Christenberry and George Hemphill: Celebrating the Pioneering Art of Bill Christenberry
Join us for a virtual discussion with Sandy Christenberry in conversation with George Hemphill. The pair will discuss the life and work of the renowned artist Bill Christenberry. Sandy is the former assistant dean of admissions a the Corcoran School of Art, where her late husband, Bill was a professor for the next forty years. Bill’s own work expressed his deep love of his native Alabama, notably Hale County made famous by James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Bill was a multi-faceted artist — painter, photographer, sculptor, story teller, and educator about the South, including that part which he abhorred – racism, as exemplified by the Ku Klux Klan. Bill was not only an internationally renowned artist but a beloved citizen of Cleveland Park where he and Sandy moved in 1972.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDZ86nYcG5o&t=13s
May 19, 2020
Juliet Eilperin in conversation with Charles Fishman
Juliet Eilperin has spent 15 years covering the environment at The Washington Post, a job that has taken her from the halls of Congress to a seat on Air Force One and the wilds of the Alaskan tundra. She will reflect on how policy, politics and science intersect when it comes to climate change, public lands, and a range of other issues that shape our planet.
Watch the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rzLAQx4bAM
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