Adam Gopnik

This award-winning journalist speaks with singular wit, eloquence and insight on modern life and culture. He has a rich trove of delightful stories and revealing observations about people and places and everyday life. Adam writes long essays on big think- ers for "The New Yorker." He has a genius for bringing these people and their ideas to life in and for communicating the emotions behind these ideas, the feelings these ideas evoke in us, and their relevance to modern life.

Adam has been writing for "The New Yorker" since 1986, and his work for the magazine has won both the National Magazine Award for Essay and the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. He has broadcasted regularly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and wrote the article on American culture for the last two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 2013, the French government named Adam a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.

In his book, "The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food," Adam goes on a quest to find the meaning of food and discovers that what matters the most isn’t what goes on the table, it’s what gathers around it: family, friends, lovers and conversation. His previous book is "Angels & Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life." In it, Adam displays his gift for using historical biography to explore the way we live today. He looks at the birth of the modern era through the lives of Lincoln and Darwin, two extraordinary people born within hours of each other 200 years ago. Among his many other books is "Through the Children’s Gate," a meditation on hope, as his family, his city and his country live through and past the events of 9/ll. In "Paris to the Moon," Adam gave us the romance that is Paris through the everyday adventures of his own American family living there from 1995 to 2000.