Said that should be a book . Yes. I read up article 10 years ago about how in a very shortly in the early 21st century more households in america will be supported by women and thats a giant flop, i mean a giant change. It made me want to explore what the implications of that might be for many women, for marriag marriages, for children, for love, for courtship and i got a great book out of it. What was the book lacks. It was written by a terrific Washington Post reporter who is now at the new America Foundation in washington. It generated, it landed on the cover of a magazine and it generated a huge conversation about how do we all need to adjust our lives to this economic new reality and is this good . I think we were in the camp of yes, anything that makes couples stronger and live up, live up to their potential is a good thing. One of the authors or pair of authors that you worked with for nancy gibbs and Michael Duffy on a book that booktv covered in our q a program covered it as well. What is the process working on the president s club with nancy gibbs and Michael Duffy . I wish i could say i came up with that idea because its such a brilliant idea but i didnt. Nancy and michael have been working on that for quite some time and the idea came to them after they had written a very great book on billy graham and they realize the degree to which the president talked to the expresident s and how much that club helped shape the presidency itself. Thats what gave them ideas to explore the president s club in a thorough way. It was a very modern idea of understanding the presidency because obviously we have to get to the 20th century for there to be enough longevity and practical for this to be possible but what we found was that presidencies were they made stronger and actually challenged by people inside this club. What was interesting about it was that we had over a dozen characters all of whom had relationships with each other going towards the path of the future. The big challenge in editing this book with how to structure it. If you look at how the book is built, we have an introduction to certain key partnerships. All along the way because it helps the reader keep track of who the characters are and it helps them move along chronologically while honoring history and their relationships as they actually happened. Did they write the president s club in what was your role . What part did you play . My role was essentially to help structure the book and give it an architecture that makes it so accessible to the reader, so easy. They forget that there are all these multiple characters on stage at once and that they can see it and not feel overwhelmed by it. My role with the cuts, something in a big believer in. If you are bored as an editor then theres a chance your readers will be too and my role was to make sure that some of the inside knowledge they had was made completely transparent to the readers of a new layer he came from and how he did things. Essentially when you have authors as talented as nancy and michael you get up in the morning and get to work. What is your editing process . What did you do when you first got the manuscript . It came in sections and the first thing you do is you read the author. You leave the office. You can do serious editing when youre in an office. You have to lock yourself some rows and completely immerse yourself in the book and becom become i mean they were the times when i would read the book and go out and get dinner and still be living in the middle of the Nixon Administration want to run back and get back into it. Thats what you want. You want the ability to sink into the story as much as possible so you can see all of its beauty and so you can occasionally make it be more beautiful. Do you take a red pen to it . Do you take a pencil to a . I take a pencil to it. My days as a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor, it allows me to move back and forth easily. It allows me to sort of give it back to them so they feel like they can look at those notes and absorb them as they would on their own terms. Another author that you worked with and are working with better audience would know is karl rove. Did he choose you or did you choose him and how did that relationship began . I had to audition for it. I got a call from my publisher. He asked me to to go down to washington. It was the first book that i was asked to edit. I have been a journalist for 30 years and he had read up on me and what stories i had covered. We had politics in common. I had actually covered him as an editor for many decades and basically my argument is you should hire me because this is my first job and i cant screw it up and it worked. Is it different working with a personality like that then it is working with a nancy gibbs and Michael Duffy who are maybe as wellknown . I think every writer has to put themselves on the page. The process is the process by definition that makes writers feel vulnerable. I think the job of the editor is to essentially protect them but also make them feel comfortable with what they are saying. One of the first conversations i had with carl is no, you cant start the book at age 30. You have to start the book with your childhood including your mothers suicide, your father leaving the home, you finding out later that your father wasnt your father, you going to meet your real father. Those issues have to be on the page as difficult as they are to talk about. Its part of what makes you you and its an identity if its an identity biography that need to include that. Readers bring up the childhood stuff because they have had experiences like his and i think thats one way you make a personality to be on stage more acceptable to you. Priscilla painton because of your background as a journalist you work on a lot of nonfiction political books read. Yes, i do. I work only on nonfiction and some of the books are not so much political as they are journalism. A book on afghanistan, a book on veterans, a book on the industry of meat that has now become an oligarchy. A lot of books that involve journalists spending many years of their lives digging alone into some of the issues we face and trying to make them readable, something that someone would want to pay hardcover 25 for spend a lot of time with. You can watch this and other programs on line at booktv. Org. Now booktv presents persons coverage of the ninth annual brooklyn book festival in brooklyn new york. For the next few hours he can watch as authors discuss politics Nelson MandelaVoting Rights and public education. But first a they panel on city planning. Hello everyone. Welcome to the brooklyn book festival at Brooklyn Law School. Our dean is here to welcome you. The dean has been a wonderful bridge between the law school and brooklyn and the brooklyn festival so i would like to introduce him to you all. [applause] thank you. Welcome to all of you. We are proud to be able to host part of the largest literary festivals in new york city and one of the largest in the United States. Certainly the hippest and most diverse look festival so we have got that working for us. Also welcome to the best law school in brooklyn. Some of you know we are the only law school in brooklyn but you know we are the best law school in the largest and most vibrant borough and the greatest city in the leading state in the most wonderful countries that we have got that working for us. Its pretty good. Yesterday marla and i returned from a short trip to russia where i was speaking to scholars and students about why study law and last night on my way to the festival gala eyes on the wall of 25j street and inscription by Alexander Hamilton that in just a few words captured everything i was trying to say. It read, the instruments by which government enacts or the laws. The first is destroyed then the latter must be used and if the latter becomes ordinary then thats the end of liberty. Now this is the borough of immigrants. Its a borough of churches but its also very much the borough of books. In true brooklyn style we dont just read them. We think about them. We talk about them. We share them. We devour them like all that great brooklyn we dont agree with them or we dont like them it wont surprise you to know that we are shy about saying that. Here in the borough of brooklyn even our laws like 25j street speaks volumes in our places, in our spaces and buildings and developments all are about the language of words, the language of books and ideas. They have been very instrumental in helping us lower the drawbridges and bringing the community and and we get a lot like giving and we get a lot in return. So it is a wonderful thing to have david on our faculty. The last thing is that i will welcome you all to programs that we are going to be sponsoring at this Time Next Year in conjunction with the book festival as part of Constitution Day which happens every year on september 17. And in large part to celebrate the 800th birthday of the magna carta. Thats right. So we are going to be hosting here a traveling exhibit that the aba has sponsored related to the magna carta and we will be hosting authors and books related to that piece of law that has had such an impact from the laws that are evolving. But that is for next year. For now, lets talk about the discussion of public spaces. Professor . [applause] okay, so we have an exciting panel and what is amazing is that it reflects the topic that her last speaker is on the way, finishing up posters for the Climate Change march and he is going to join us. So dont gasp when he comes into the room, we will ignore him when he is here. The title is planning and protesting and cities evolve. There is an exclamation point at the end of the title and i will introduce her speaker briefly and hold up their books and then im going to turn it over to them. I have asked each of them to speak for five minutes and then we are going to have a crosstalk on the panel and then open it up to the audience. I ask that if you have a question, please come up to the microphone and ive heard that this one is better. And im hoping that we have engaged conversation until about 10 50 p. M. Source speakers in order are peter linebaugh. His book is disclosures and resistance and our next speaker is daniel campo, his book is the accidental playground. And then finally today we have the two coauthors, ben shepherd and greg simon. Without further ado, i turn it over to peter. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you, dean, for the reference to magna carta. As well as the quotations from Alexander Hamilton. I am here to talk about this book and they are the enclosures of our lands and our lives and our citizens. And so magna carta. And there was a big charter and the little charter. The charter of the forest covered on 11th of september, 1217. This was the charter that introduced a principal at Alexander Hamilton ignored. We have learned from him here at Brooklyn Law School and there are two principles of government. Force and law. The charter before us is 11th of september at 1217 that introduces a third principle it is our duty and task to recover and that is the principle of direct democracy and assembly for principal snyder of coercion or law and that is neither the state nor the market or the military and a principal by which we govern our affairs. And this principle has fallen under the onslaught of neoliberalism as our prisons become greater and our city becomes more walled and as the lands and the forests and the seas have become sewers for the dumping of the trash of the 1 . In the book is an attempt to show that we have Common Ground as we search in our future for the recovery of this principle of commenting. Where the earth and socalled Natural Resources are not seen as commodities, but our means in which we, by which we form our communities. And that is the alpha and omega of this. Thanks to the dean, he mentioned Alexander Hamilton and magna carta and i wanted to introduce the subject through them. And i believe that the principle of this in the past was one of custom rather than law. So the book recovers those customs and recovers those practices of selfmanagement and of actual democracy and of direct democracy, whether it is our food, whether it is our habitat or clothing. These are part of the charter of the forest. The big charter and the little charter. These are the two charters of english liberty that William Blackstone wrote about it he taught to Alexander Hamilton and the others. Two charters of liberty. A big one and a little one. A little one consists of the common. But if you look at the big one, magna carta, chapter seven, it says that the widow shell have her access to the common. And she shall have this which is arcane language and doesnt take much to recover its meaning. Meaning that she could go to the forest to access fossil fuels for subsistence purposes. We now live not with oil or woods, but with oil. And how are we going to rebuild our planet . And this book provides some background to that. It is hidden and it is unknown to us. As a people, we must recover that. Peter, on that note that is five minutes. What continue the conversation to turn it over to our next speaker. I so look forward to hearing them we met our next speaker coming up to the podium today is daniel campo. I just have to say that i love the shape of this book. Thank you. Thank you, david. Its great to be here and so great to be part of the brooklyn book festival here at the law school and its wonderful on sunday morning to be up and awake and alert and ready for some discussions. My book is about commons as well, but its kind of inadvertent commons. My book looks at the williamsburg waterfront in the period before the condominiums and the fairy and therefore all of this stuff that we read about in the New York Times and new york magazine, it is like everyday. And the story that i tell is actually several stories, but it is a store of nations. It is a reclamation of nations and art landscape but it is one that was made without money and without professional assistance and no architects and no politicians. It was a reclamation without permission and a reclamation without intent. And it was a place, thinking about this and we can just take the ferry there and walked down from bedford avenue to where it needs to be at the river and you can see what is there now and you can think about what was there and what was their was a common place where people could do what they wanted with very few constraints and definitely an anarchic place where people use that opportunity to do Different Things that they couldnt do elsewhere in the city. Building a skate park, one that was written up in all this skateboarding magazines. A punk rock band which is probably right now getting ready for the protest, every sunday afternoon, creating actually the soundtrack of this anarchist waterfront, performers getting ready to go to burning man at the end of august every year, where we practice there on sunday night. And there are all kinds of land artist and installation artist and performance artists to have Different Things with this industrialized landscape. The very matter of what made the Williamsburg Williamsburg and industrial fabric of this place, reconstructing it and rearranging it an interesting and provocative ways. So some think that this is all about hipsters and cool artist and keyboarders, but this serves as a place where residents could just go and pitch a blanket and have a picnic or they could fish or get their feet wet in the river that everyone said was dirty beyond belief. But somehow it was this pleasing and beautiful place and people went there and they made it their own. I got to know people. In addition to my training as a city planner, im looking at it through many different lenses and i got to share some of the stories in the book and i befriended a bunch of bluecollar guys from the neighborhood and they would get together every day and they would drink beer and smoke pot in a Little Corner of this waterfront that no one else seems to want to be a part of. There were also homeless immigrant laborers, many of them from mexico and from el salvador, and they were working on construction sites in the late 90s and early 2000 in south williamsburg. And they lived there, they lived near their work, they didnt have enough money or documentation to have a regular apartment. And the neighbors change as time goes on. Anyway, im going to wrap it up and i do invite your questions and i thank you. [applause] so our first coauthor is going to talk to us and ben shepperd is here as well. So we looked at this and it is really two parts, repression and resistance. I do oppression and he does resistance. I think that my job is more fun, but i think that his is the one that everyone looks to read. So when we talk about this and the way that i define it is maybe a little bit unusual. It is the location where we negotiate conflicts with other people. And this is where we work it out and we sort of bump into someone and say im sorry, excuse me, to the big marches and protests. Some ways i figure this is another warm of the type of example that peter was talking about where we substitute publicly owned public spaces and spaces are privately owned and if you want them to build it skyscraper, you can build it if you provide this at the street level and that did not work out very well. One of the things that was very interesting was the kinds of things that get built by elite developers in what i call as a leading indicator. So you get an advance look at what is going to happen. And what you see is the ones like you might think of, unreasonable, nobodys there, and its not by coincidence but its by design and the architects were given pretty clear instructions. And so what that reflects as a retreat from the city. Which is interesting because this is before you have a lot of the unrest of the later 1960s and by 1975, they kind of wake up to the conflicts that we have in new york city. And strangely by that point, developers have changed this to filtered spaces, citibank is actually the institution that triggers the financial crisis and they say business is no longer sustainable and i cant go on, but then there is that tower and the public space a