Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “The Genius of Benjamin Franklin,” with Richard Bell, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/benjamin-franklin .]

Benjamin Franklin’s genius is a puzzle. Born the tenth and youngest son of a decidedly humble family of puritan candle-makers, his rise to the front ranks of science, engineering, and invention was as unexpected as it was meteoric. Despite having only two years of formal schooling, he would end up receiving honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and St. Andrews, as well as the 18th century’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize for Physics.

Like his hero, Isaac Newton, Franklin was driven by a perpetual dissatisfaction with the world as he knew it. He optimized, tinkered, and improved. Hardly the tortured genius, he took a schoolboy’s pleasure in everything he made. Experimenting was a constant source of beauty, pleasure, and amusement for him, even when things went wrong (which they did all the time).

In this talk Bell will examine many of Franklin’s ideas to make life simpler, cheaper, and easier for himself and everyone else. It turns out that those ideas encompassed not only natural science and engineering—the kite experiments and the bifocals for which he is justly remembered—but also all sorts of public works, civic improvements, political innovation, and fresh new business ideas. His experimenter’s instinct, his relentless drive to build a better world one small piece at a time, even encompassed innovations in medical device design, in music, in cookery, and in ventriloquism.

Be on hand as Richard Bell, a favorite of Profs and Pints fans who previously has given a host of excellent talks, returns to the stage to discuss what lessons—and great intellectual habits—we all can learn by examining Benjamin Franklin’s life. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Benjamin Franklin near a bust of Isaac Newton as painted by David Martin in 1767 (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts).

Profs and Pints DC presents: “A Bird’s-Eye View of the Flu,” on the centuries-long struggle to contain the influenza virus and why it keeps roaring back, with Alexandra M. Lord, a curator and the chair of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/the-flu .]

Even if you did not catch the flu this winter, you almost certainly have felt the effects of bird flu on your wallet if you shop for eggs.
What you might not have realized at the time is that birds, eggs, and influenza are linked together in many other ways having nothing to do with grocery prices.

Learn about the long history of influenza pandemics and the fascinating connections between birds, eggs, influenza, and flu vaccines from Alexandra M. Lord, who in addition to her work at the Smithsonian is a former historian for the United States Public Health Service.

Dr. Lord, who previously gave excellent Profs and Pints talks on the history of contraception, will give an overview of efforts to contain and control influenza over the last two hundred and fifty years. She’ll explore why some pandemics, such as that of 1918-1919, led to millions of deaths while others, such as that of 1957-1958, sputtered out before they did real damage.

You’ll learn how the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic prompted scientists both in and outside the federal government to work to develop an understanding of the influenza virus in hopes of predicting and preventing future pandemics.

To their dismay, scientists have discovered that the influenza virus constantly drifts and shifts, making it difficult to predict. Although an influenza vaccine was developed in the 1940s, the constantly evolving nature of the virus has meant that this vaccine needs to be updated every year to reflect changes in the virus.

Multiple different players have played a role not just in tracking the disease but also in helping to create these new vaccines. They include not just scientists but poultry farmers whose eggs are used to produce the vaccine. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The vaccine formulated to combat the influenza strain that caused the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957-58 (National Museum of American History / The Fournet Drugstore Collection).

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Trump Versus Free Speech,” on the current administration’s efforts to impose orthodoxy and stifle dissent, with Stephen Vladeck, professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center and nationally recognized expert on constitutional law and the federal courts.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/trump-versus-free-speech .]

In his first 100 days in office, President Trump has taken a host of actions that have advocates of free speech concerned. Among such moves, he has punished law firms for representing former government officials who were involved in Trump-related investigations. He has cut off federal funding from universities and other entities for supporting causes to which he objects. He has shut down government programs simply for using terminology he doesn’t like. And he has reassigned or even terminated federal employees for no other reason than because they hold different political views.

Many, if not most, of these initiatives are called into question by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and its guarantee of the right to freedom of speech. As Justice Robert Jackson wrote for the Supreme Court in 1943, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Be on hand for a discussion of such actions—and what they mean for our right to speak out—with Stephen Vladeck, nationally recognized expert on constitutional law and the federal courts, Supreme Court analyst for CNN, editor and author of the One First weekly newsletter, and author of the New York Times bestseller The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.

Professor Vladeck will discuss the Trump administration’s efforts to impose orthodoxy and why and how they’re inconsistent with the First Amendment and with constitutional limits on the government’s ability to impose conditions on recipients of federal funds.

He’ll also talk about the role that the courts have played so far—and are likely to play in the future—in pushing back against such measures. And he’ll examine a much broader problem, the extent to which the Trump administration’s actions seem intended to (and likely will) chill the exercise of one of our most important constitutional rights: the right to object. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image from Canva.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Goddess of Spring and the Underworld,” an introduction to the Greek goddess Persephone in her many incarnations, with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/pomegranate .]

Join Brittany Warman, who has earned a huge following among Profs and Pints fans by delivering fantastic talks on folklore, myths, legends, and fantasy, for the perfect event for the season: a look at the spring goddess Persephone and the many ways in which she has inspired the human imagination.

The story of Hades and Persephone is one of the most famous—and most retold—episodes in Greek mythology. Persephone’s abduction, her interlude in the Underworld, and her partial return to the world above have inspired statues and webcomics, ancient cults and contemporary poetry. Thousands of years after her tale was first told, we’re still fascinated by this goddess.

Brittany will discuss how Persephone’s appeal lies in her liminality in being caught between two very different worlds and lives. She represents spring, renewal, and rebirth because Earth blooms with her return, but she’s also the Queen of the Underworld. From a 21st-century perspective, she’s basically a goth girl adorned with a flower crown.

We’ll also look at Persephone’s mythic roots, including their connections to the Eleusinian Mysteries. And then we’ll dive into some of the ways that Persephone has been revised and retold in recent years, from the Tony award-winning musical Hadestown to the webcomic Lore Olympus to memes and fairy tales and fashion.

After all, why be just one thing when you can be the queen of spring and darkness? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

An image from “Proserpine” (Persephone) painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1882. (Birmingham Museums Trust / Wikimedia Commons.)