Uploaded October 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
A conversation between journalist Simon Kuper and fellow journalist Pamela Druckerman about Simon Kuper's new memoir "Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century".
Filmed on 25/09/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
In more than twenty years living in Paris, Simon Kuper has experienced the city both as a human being and a journalist. He has enjoyed croissants, taken his children to youth soccer in the banlieues and has watched Paris — and himself — change through terrorist attacks, heatwaves, protests, the Covid pandemic and the Olympics. His memoir mixes personal observations with reportage on the evolution of one of the world’s great cities.
About the speakers:
Simon Kuper is a Financial Times journalist who has lived in Paris since 2002. He is now a British-French dual citizen. His books include Soccernomics (co-written with Stefan Szymanski), Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK and, published in 2024, Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century.
Pamela Druckerman is a journalist and the author of five books including Bringing Up Bébé, which has been translated into 31 languages. She won an Emmy for The Forger, a New York Times documentary about a French teenager in WWII. Her op-eds, essays, articles and reviews have been published in the New York Times, the Economist, the Atlantic, Le Monde and many other publications.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
A conversation between journalist Simon Kuper and fellow journalist Pamela Druckerman about Simon Kuper's new memoir "Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century".
Filmed on 25/09/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
In more than twenty years living in Paris, Simon Kuper has experienced the city both as a human being and a journalist. He has enjoyed croissants, taken his children to youth soccer in the banlieues and has watched Paris — and himself — change through terrorist attacks, heatwaves, protests, the Covid pandemic and the Olympics. His memoir mixes personal observations with reportage on the evolution of one of the world’s great cities.
About the speakers:
Simon Kuper is a Financial Times journalist who has lived in Paris since 2002. He is now a British-French dual citizen. His books include Soccernomics (co-written with Stefan Szymanski), Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK and, published in 2024, Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century.
Pamela Druckerman is a journalist and the author of five books including Bringing Up Bébé, which has been translated into 31 languages. She won an Emmy for The Forger, a New York Times documentary about a French teenager in WWII. Her op-eds, essays, articles and reviews have been published in the New York Times, the Economist, the Atlantic, Le Monde and many other publications.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.










![Writing Politics with Giuliano da Empoli and Antonio Monda
A conversation with Giuliano da Empoli and Antonio Monda at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 27/11/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
How can fiction operate as a tool for political analysis? What fresh insights might we unlock by understanding geopolitical actors as characters?
Giuliano da Empoli is an accomplished political essayist and social commentator. His recent debut novel, Le Mage du Kremlin (translated into English as The Wizard of the Kremlin) quickly garnered international attention, becoming a popular hit in France, Italy, and beyond. The novel centers on a fictionalized version of a real person: Vladislav Surkov, a former adviser to Vladimir Putin.
Speaking about his decision to tell this story through fiction, rather than a political essay, da Empoli stated: “[A]t the heart of power, and Russian power in particular, there are elements of paradox, a permanent contradiction, an irrationality that only literature could transcribe.” (“[A]u cœur du pouvoir, et du pouvoir russe en particulier, il y a des éléments de paradoxe, une contradiction permanente, une irrationalité que seule la littérature pouvait transcrire.”) Join us to learn more about da Empoli’s novel, his political research, and his thoughts on the relationship between fact and fiction.
About the Speakers:
Giuliano da Empoli is an Italian and Swiss political scientist and writer. He teaches at Sciences Po Paris and has published fourteen books on subjects ranging from information overload (Overdose, 2002) to national-populist spin doctors (Les ingénieurs du chaos, 2019). He was Deputy Mayor for Culture in Florence (2009-2012) and a Senior Advisor to the Italian Prime Minister (2014-2016). His first novel, Le Mage du Kremlin (Gallimard, 2022) was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Académie française and is currently being translated in over 30 languages.
Antonio Monda is the founder and Artistic Director of Le Conversazioni and has directed the Rome Film Festival between 2015 and 2021. He has curated exhibitions for the MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Lincoln Center and is currently consulting for the Louvre. He teaches at NYU and is a columnist for RAI and a regular contributor for La Repubblica. The ninth chapter of his ten-volume saga about New York was recently published. His books have been translated into eleven languages.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg. Writing Politics with Giuliano da Empoli and Antonio Monda](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZAN4Mym_g60/mqdefault.jpg)