Elie Mystal Presents the 2025 Kahn Humanities Lecture

BPL Presents welcomes the 2025 Kahn Humanities Lecture with Elie Mystal—a legal scholar, author, and commentator—on why the courts won't save us.

A legal analyst for the storied Nation magazine, Mystal is a fellow at Type Media Center and a New York Times bestselling author of several books. In this unique talk tailored for the Kahn Humanities series, he will tease out a proposed legal framework that would restore a robust degree of democratic accountability to our body of laws, courts and civic institutions—with a blunt warning how, whatever is useful, it won't be the courts (or the courts alone) that will save us.

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PARTICIPANTS

Elie Mystal is The New York Times bestselling author Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America and Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution as well as The Nation’s legal analyst and justice correspondent, and the legal editor of the More Perfect podcast on the Supreme Court for Radiolab. He is an Alfred Knobler Fellow at Type Media Center, and a frequent guest on MSNBC and Sirius XM. He lives in New York.

 

 

 

Farai Chideya is an author, researcher, and broadcaster, currently working on a project about shared futures and a book/ multimedia project about the future of work in the age of AI. She is the author of six books, the most recent of which is 2016's The Episodic Career: How to Thrive at Work in the Age of Disruption. Over the years  she has combined media, technology, and socio-political analysis during a career as an award-winning author, journalist, professor, and lecturer.

Among her previous jobs: hosting the public radio show Our Body Politic, being the journalism program officer at the Ford Foundation, working as a Senior Writer covering politics and data at FiveThirtyEight during the tumultuous 2016 election, and teaching while a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.  With deep knowledge in a variety of disciplines, including the future of work, politics, culture, race, and technology, Chideya frequently appeared on public radio and cable television, and has worked for CNN, ABC, and NPR, and appeared on numerous other networks. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Chideya graduated from Harvard University. She lives in Brooklyn.