Boston Book Festival invites you to join us for
My Dinner With…
The BBF is excited to announce our signature spring fundraiser series where you can connect with brilliant authors in an intimate setting, enjoy a fabulous meal, and participate in a lively and stimulating discussion – all while supporting the BBF.
Seats are limited – tickets below.
SOLD OUT!
Dinner with Rebecca Goldstein
Date: Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Time: 6:00 – 9:30 pm
Cambridge: Hosted by Deborah Porter and Tom Wallace
Minimum donation: $500/person
Rebecca Goldstein’s latest nonfiction, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, explores why humans are obsessed with our own significance. Her conclusion reframes the question of what it means for a human life to flourish.
Goldstein is the author of ten books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant. Her National Humanities Medal citation praises her for “bringing philosophy into conversation with culture.” Here is your chance to discuss the meaning of life with a philosopher!
The Mattering Instinct is a testament to the idea that humans find purpose when, as the poet Rumi wrote, we ‘let the beauty we love be what we do.’ In a world fractured by competing claims on what’s important, Goldstein offers a vision that is both intellectually resonant and humane, reminding us that the struggle to justify our existence is the very thing that makes our existence matter. ― John Kaag, The Atlantic
SOLD OUT!
Dinner with Marc Dunkelman
Date: Monday, April 27, 2026
Time: 6:00 – 9:30 pm
Beacon Hill: Hosted by Cindy and John Reed
Minimum Donation: $500/person
Marc Dunkelman’s latest book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress – And How to Bring it Back, argues that we now live in a vetocracy where nearly everyone can stifle progress. Marc is a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. His vantage point isn’t purely academic, however — Marc once worked on Capitol Hill for Democratic members of the House and Senate. Join the conversation about why the US can no longer do big things and how to fix the problem.
[Dunkelman] deftly maps how anti-poverty and then environmental policy were designed to empower local communities to resist outside forces, putting liberalism at the service of stymieing grand plans…Why Nothing Works is blunt and exhortative…but
Dunkelman is making a subtle point about the interplay between cultural emotion and social design.―The New Yorker
SOLD OUT!
Dinner with Steven Pinker
Date: Thursday, April 30, 2026
Time: 6:00 – 9:30 pm
Seaport: Hosted by Karen Roth
Minimum Donation: $500/person
Steven Pinker has won many prizes for his teaching and his research on cognition, language, and social relations. His books include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Enlightenment Now, and most recently, When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. He is one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Come enjoy a conversation about how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of a variety of phenomena, from financial bubbles to revolutions to the awkwardness of a first date — all while taking in the views from a penthouse apartment in the Seaport.
Insight packed. With brisk authority, Pinker shows that a key aspect of being human, sociality, depends on a mutual understanding of intentions, which allows us to make sense of responses like laughing and blushing and phenomena as various as myth-making and online cancel culture.
—Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate in Economics and New York Times bestselling author of Why Nations Fail
Dinner with Jelani Cobb
Date: Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Time: 6:00 – 9:30 pm
Brookline: Hosted by Marina Kalb and David Feinberg
Minimum Donation: $500/person
Jelani Cobb is dean of the Columbia School of Journalism and a staff writer at the New Yorker. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst since 2019. Jelani’s latest book, Three Or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025, collects his best essays of the period and covers, through interviews and profiles, not only how the trajectory of politics in this country is about race and the reactionary backlash to Obama’s presidency, but also how history is digested and reproduced by culture.
Journalist and Ground Truth founder Charlie Sennott will lead the conversation with Jelani.
Trained first as a scholar and then as a journalist, Jelani Cobb is an essayist of rare erudition and integrity. From his first pieces about Trayvon Martin to his more recent explorations of race in the Trump era, he has been an exemplar of intellectual honesty, fierce self-questioning, and independence. Jelani Cobb is a truth-teller and this book is a gift. —David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker
If you have any questions about the “My Dinner With” Spring Series, please contact Carlin Carr at carlin@bostonbookfest.org.
