Join author Mitchell Zuckoff in conversation with NPR/WBUR’s Jeremy Hobson, co-host of “Here and Now,” to discuss Zuckoff’s new book, “Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11.” As a reporter for The Boston Globe, Zuckoff wrote the lead news story on 9/11 and led a team of reporters investigating the worst terrorist attacks in American history. Now he’s written the first comprehensive, character-driven nonfiction narrative about 9/11. Already under contract to Lionsgate/3Arts for a major television event, “Fall and Rise” covers the four hijackings; the events at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and outside Shanksville, PA; and the chaotic initial military and government response, including never-before-told stories of heroism, tragedy, and survival.

Join author Mitchell Zuckoff in conversation with NPR/WBUR’s Jeremy Hobson, co-host of “Here and Now,” to discuss Zuckoff’s new book, “Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11.” As a reporter for The Boston Globe, Zuckoff wrote the lead news story on 9/11 and led a team of reporters investigating the worst terrorist attacks in American history. Now he’s written the first comprehensive, character-driven nonfiction narrative about 9/11. Already under contract to Lionsgate/3Arts for a major television event, “Fall and Rise” covers the four hijackings; the events at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and outside Shanksville, PA; and the chaotic initial military and government response, including never-before-told stories of heroism, tragedy, and survival.

For John Urschel, what began as an insatiable appetite for puzzles as a child quickly evolved into mastery of the elegant systems and rules of mathematics. By the time he was thirteen, Urschel was auditing college-level calculus courses. But when he joined his high school football team, a new interest began to eclipse the thrill he once felt in the classroom. Football challenged Urschel in an entirely different way, and he became addicted to the physical contact of the sport. Accepting a scholarship to play football at Penn State, Urschel refused to sacrifice one passion for another, and simultaneously pursued his bachelor’s and then master’s degrees in mathematics. Against the odds, Urschel found a way to manage his double life as a scholar and an athlete, and so when he was drafted to the Baltimore Ravens, he enrolled in his PhD at MIT.

Weaving together two separate yet bound narratives, Urschel relives for us the most pivotal moments of his bifurcated life. He explains why, after Penn State was sanctioned for the acts of former coach Jerry Sandusky, he turned his back on offers from Ivy League universities and refused to abandon his team, and contends with his mother’s repeated request, at the end of every season, that he quit the sport and pursue a career in rocket science. Perhaps most personally, he opens up about the correlation between football and CTE, and the risks he took for the game he loves. Equally at home with both Bernard Riemann’s notion of infinity and Bill Belichick’s playbook, Urschel reveals how each challenge – whether on the field or in the classroom – has brought him closer to understanding the two different halves of his own life, and how reason and emotion, the mind and the body, are always working together. He asks why, “So often, people want to divide the world into two. Matter and energy. Wave and particle. Athlete and mathematician. Why can’t something be both?”

John Urschel is a former offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens and a PhD candidate at MIT. He has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mathematics from Penn State, and in 2013, he won the Sullivan Award, given to “the most outstanding amateur athlete in the United States,” and the Campbell Trophy, awarded to the country’s top scholar-athlete in college football.

Louisa Thomas is the author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams and Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family–a Test of Will and Faith in World War I. She is a contributor to the New Yorker’s website and a former writer and editor for Grantland. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Vogue, and other places.

Selected by President Obama to be the fifth inaugural poet in history, Richard Blanco followed in the footsteps of Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. The youngest, first Latino, first immigrant, and first openly gay person to serve in the role, he read his inaugural poem, “One Today,” on January 21, 2013. Blanco and his family arrived in Miami as exiles from Cuba through Madrid, where he was born. The negotiation of cultural identity and universal themes of place and belonging characterize his three collections of poetry. His poems have also appeared in The Best American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems. Blanco is a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a recipient of two Florida Artist Fellowships, and a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. A builder of cities as well as poems, he is also a professional civil engineer and lives in Bethel, Maine, and Miami, Florida. He currently serves as the Education Ambassador for the American Academy of Poets.

Jim Braude is the host Greater Boston and co-host of Boston Public Radio. He has worked with co-host Margery Eagan for 18 years, first doing a TV show together at NECN then a radio show at WTKK. The duo came to WGBH in 2013. During law school, Jim ran a small retail business in Provincetown (HUBE – Help Us Break Even!). He started his professional career as a legal services lawyer in the South Bronx handling housing and prisoners’ rights cases. He was the founder and first president of the National Organization of Legal Services Workers, a union representing staff in civil legal offices for the poor in 35 states. NOLSW helped lead the fight to preserve the national program when President Reagan proposed its abolition. He then served as the executive director of TEAM, the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts, a tax reform coalition, during which time he led many ballot campaigns, including the defeat of what would have been the largest budget cut on the ballot in U.S. history. He published Otherwise, a magazine on American politics, and then served as a Cambridge City Councilor. Jim graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and New York University’s Law School.

Margery Eagan is the co-host of 89.7 WGBH’s midday program Boston Public Radio. She has worked with co-host Jim Braude for 18 years, first doing a TV show together at NECN then a radio show at WTKK. The duo came to WGBH in 2013. She has written for her hometown paper, The Fall River Herald News, as well as the Standard Times of New Bedford, Boston Globe, Burlington Vermont Free Press, Boston Magazine, and the Boston Herald, where she wrote a column for 27 years. Eagan grew up in Fall River and attended Durfee High school. She attended Smith College and graduated from Stanford University. She has three kids and lives in Brookline.

The world is crazy. Creative work is hard. And nothing is getting any easier! In his previous books—Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!, New York Times bestsellers with over a million copies in print combined—Austin Kleon gave readers the key to unlock their creativity and then showed them how to share it. Now he completes his trilogy with his most inspiring work yet. Keep Going gives the reader life-changing, illustrated advice and encouragement on how to stay creative, focused, and true to yourself in the face of personal burnout or external distractions.

AUSTIN KLEON is the New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work! and The Steal Like An Artist Journal: A Notebook For Creative Kleptomaniacs. His work has been translated into over twenty languages and featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS Newshour, and in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. New York Magazine called his work “brilliant,” The Atlantic called him “positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet,” and The New Yorker said his poems “resurrect the newspaper when everybody else is declaring it dead.” He speaks about creativity in the digital age for organizations such as Pixar, Google, SXSW, TEDx, and The Economist. In previous lives, he worked as a librarian, a web designer, and an advertising copywriter. He grew up in the cornfields of Ohio, but now he lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and sons. Visit him online at www.austinkleon.com and follow him on Twitter and Instagram @austinkleon and on Facebook @Mr.Austin.Kleon.

The powerfully told story of a group of German Jews desperately seeking American visas to escape Nazi Germany, and an illuminating account of America’s response to the refugee crisis of the 1930’s and 40’s. This book complements the exhibition The Americans and the Holocaust that is now on view at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC

In October 1940 the Gestapo expelled 6,504 Jews from southwest Germany, creating the first official “Jewish free zone” in the Third Reich. Interned in concentration camps in Vichy France, the deportees set out on a multi-year quest to acquire American visas. One in four eventually managed to gain entry to the U.S. or to other foreign countries; the remainder perished in French camps or, later, in Auschwitz.

Among these “unwanted” refugees were Jews from the village of Kippenheim, whose stories are at the heart of this book. Drawing on previously unpublished letters, diaries, and visa records, Michael Dobbs provides a vivid picture of what it was like to live among increasingly hostile neighbors, waiting for “the piece of paper with a stamp” that meant the difference between life and death. And he recounts the debates over the fate of these refugees occurring simultaneously at the highest levels of the American government at a time when the public was deeply isolationist, xenophobic and antisemitic. Here is the riveting narrative of a small community struggling to survive amid tumultuous events and reach a safe haven despite the odds stacked against them.

Michael Dobbs was born and educated in Britain, but is now a U.S. citizen. He was a long-time reporter for The Washington Post, covering the collapse of communism as a foreign correspondent. He has taught at leading American universities, including Princeton, the University of Michigan, and Georgetown. He is currently on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His previous books include the bestselling One Minute to Midnight on the Cuban missile crisis, which was part of an acclaimed Cold War trilogy. He lives outside Washington, D.C.

Please visit https://www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/nyunwantedppg0419 to register.