A Summer of Fear: Violence, Intimidation, and Freedom of Speech in the US
Fintan O’Toole in conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Patricia J. Williams
The New York Review of Books’s Advising Editor, Fintan O’Toole, hosts Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Patricia J. Williams for a wide-ranging conversation on political violence in America.
This conversation was recorded on October 9, 2025.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.
Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law Emerita at Columbia Law School and University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. She is a pioneer of the law and literature movement and a scholar of feminism and race in American jurisprudence. For two decades, she wrote the “Diary of a Mad Law Professor” column for The Nation. She is a MacArthur Fellow, the 1997 Reith Lecturer for the BBC, and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. Her most recent book is The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law.
About this series
The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing issues emerging from the second Trump administration. In each conversation the Review’s Advising Editor, Fintan O’Toole, will talk with a group of contributors and esteemed guests about critical subjects, including immigration, political violence, the rule of law, and the state of the left.