Adam Gopnik: The New Yorker Cometh to Miami.
A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1986, Adam Gopnik was born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal. He received his B.A. in Art History from McGill University, before completing his graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His first essay in The New Yorker, “Quattrocento Baseball” appeared in May of 1986 and he served as the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995. That year, he left New York to live and write in Paris, where he wrote The New Yorker’s “Paris Journal” for the next five years. His expanded collection of essays from Paris, Paris To the Moon, appeared in 2000, and was called by the New York Times “the finest book on France in recent years.” While in Paris, he began work on an adventure novel, The King in the Window, which was published in 2005. He still often writes from Paris for The New Yorker and has edited the anthology Americans in Paris for the Library of America.
Gopnik’s 2006 book, Through the Children’s Gate: A Home In New York collected and expanded his essays from the previous five years about life in New York and about raising two children in the shadow of many kinds of sadness.
In 2009, Gopnik completed Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Lincoln, Darwin And Modern Life, which became a national best-seller. Shortly after, in 2010, Gopnik published another children’s novel, The Steps Across the Water, which chronicles the adventures of a young girl, Rose, in U Nork.
In 2011, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asked Gopnik to deliver the 50th anniversary Massey Lectures, broadcast every year throughout Canada. His Massey Lectures, called Winter: Five Windows on the Season, were published that same fall — as was his collection of essays on cooking and eating, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food.
In the past five years, Gopnik has engaged in many musical projects, working both as a lyricist and libretto writer.
Gopnik has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism three times, as well as the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, and the Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for arts writing. His work has been anthologized many times, in Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, Best American Food Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing. In March of 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Republic. Two months later, he received an honoris causa from McGill University. He lives in New York with his wife, filmmaker Martha Parker, and their two children, Luke Auden and Olivia Esme Claire.
The videos below are organized by topic and run between 30 seconds and 4 minutes. Click on any video. You must be connected to the Internet to view the videos.
PERSEVERANCE FURTHERS: 2:39 min.
SERENDIPITY: 3:08 min.
INSIGHT & INSPIRATION: 0:58 sec.
SEIZES OPPORTUNITIES: 2:48 min.
CRITICAL THINKING: 4:02 min.
