Decades of writing bestselling books and award-winning essays has seen Adam Gopnik take on myriad topics. But recently a question obsessed him: how did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf?

In The Real Work the long standing New Yorker writer apprentices as a boxer, a dancer and a driving instructor and other roles he’d assumed beyond him. He finds that learning a skill is a process of methodically breaking down and building up, and that the key, in any field, is mastering other people’s minds.

Please note booking and registration for events closes 10 minutes prior to the advertised start time.

In Association with the Rabin Chair Forum of The George Washington University.

Adam Gopnik has been writing for the New Yorker since 1986. He is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism, and the George Polk Award for magazine reporting. From 1995 to 2000 he lived in Paris; he now lives in New York City with his wife and their two children.

Francesca Specter is the writer of The Shoulds – an online, reader-funded publication exploring the hidden rules & stories that shape our lives. She’s also the author of Alonement, a Times book of the year 2021, and host of an award-nominated podcast of the same name – now in its eighth season.