Kai Bird, an American author and columnist, speaks in opposition of the motion that This House would press the Red Button. Mr Bird recounts Robert Oppenheimer's own failure to convince President Harry Truman and General Eisenhower of the dangers of unchecked nuclear proliferation.

Former Fellow Nicholas Boggs was awarded a Whiting Award in Nonfiction for his biography of James Baldwin.

Drawing on extensive archival material newly brought to light by the author, James Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, Black American painter Beauford Delaney; his lover and muse, Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and his collaborators, famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac. For the first time, this biography shows how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, aesthetic, and erotic—and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and Black and queer literary history.

American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer by Executive Director Kai Bird and Marty Sherwin, first published in 2006, has become an international bestseller on the heels of being used as the basis for Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film Oppenheimer. Profiles of Bird have appeared in the New York Times Magazine (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/books/oppenheimer-american-prometheus-sherwin-bird.html) and he has published a number of articles related to the film and book, most notably in the New Yorker and the New York Times.