Upcoming meetings
All are welcome - no need to RSVP or register
Unless otherwise noted, all meetings are on Thursdays at 10:00 am promptly



Date:  January 8, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 712 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty?
Speaker:  John Seabrook, staff writer at The New Yorker
THIS WILL BE A ZOOM-ONLY MEETING
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE
My talk to about the mixed legacy of my grandfather, C.F. Seabrook who created an agricultural empire of frozen vegetables on South Jersey called Seabrook Farms. Revered by many of his workers as a humanitarian business leader who inspired and in some cases saved them, he turned on his own family, destroyed his relationships with his sons, and in the process wrecked the business. My father only revealed the truth about his father after he died when he left me proof of the kind of man my grandfather was. In writing The Spinach King, I had to reconcile the official mythologized portrait of C.F. Seabrook with the way he treated his family, and my father's posthumous desire for revenge.
John Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than three decades. He is the author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, Flash of Genius: And Other True Stories of Invention, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture and other books. The film Flash of Genius was based on one of his stories. He and his family live in Brooklyn.



Date:  January 15, 2026, 10:00–12:00
What:  55PLUS VOLUNTEERS MEETING.   ALL ARE WELCOME!
Topic: Discussion about running 55Plus and future plans
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE



Date:  January 22, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 713 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: Lessons we can learn today from the activists and organizers of the Women’s Liberation Movement
Speaker:  Clara Bingham, Journalist and author
THIS WILL BE A ZOOM-ONLY MEETING
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE
Bingham's second book, Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law (with Laura Leedy Gansler, Doubleday 2002), was adapted into the 2005 feature film North Country (Warner Bros.) staring Charlize Theron and Francis McDormand. She is also the author of Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress (Times Books 1997). A graduate of Harvard College (1985), Bingham got her start in journalism as a correspondent in the Washington, DC bureau of Newsweek magazine.
Clara Bingham is a journalist and author whose work has focused on social justice and women's issues. Her latest book, The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2024. A history of the early years of second wave feminism, The Movement is written in a similar oral history narrative style to her previous book, Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul (Random House 2016)



Date:  February 5, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 714 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: Fables and Confabulations: The Stories We Tell About Our Bodies, and The Stories Our Bodies Tell Us
Speaker:  Pria Anand, Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine and attending phisician at the Boston Medical Center
THIS WILL BE A ZOOM-ONLY MEETING
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE
Stories are etched into the very structure of our brains, coded so deeply that the impulse for storytelling survives and even surges after the most devastating injuries. But the stories our brains concoct are also malleable, shaped by cultural narratives about bodies and illness that permeate the minds of doctors and patients alike. In this talk by a practicing neurologist, we will use medical history, mythology, neurologic symptoms, and science to explore the intersection between storytelling and the brain.
Pria Anand is a neurologist and the author of The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, named a Best Book of June and Best Science & Technology Book of 2025 by Barnes & Noble and a Best Book of the Summer by The Observer, Publisher's Weekly, The Globe and Mail, and Book Riot. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She is now an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and she cares for patients at the Boston Medical Center.



Date:  February 19, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 715 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: [American Table]
Speaker:  Paula Johnson, Curator at National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
THIS WILL BE A ZOOM-ONLY MEETING
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE



Date:  March 5, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 716 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: Walking with Wisdom and Anxiety: Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of the Current World
Speaker:  Rachel Paster, Psy.D. (she/her), Clinical Psychologist, Director of Clinical Training, Interim Clinical Site Director, Boston Office
THIS WILL BE A HYBRID MEETING (in-person at TJC & via Zoom)
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE
Dr. Rachel Paster is a Clinical Psychologist at Center for Anxiety where she is the Director of Clinical Training and Interim Director of the Boston Office (though she is based in New Jersey). Dr. Paster holds Masters degrees in Risk and Prevention and Adjustment Counseling from Harvard's Graduate School of Education as well as a Doctorate in Psychology from William James College with a certificate in Latino Mental Health. She completed her APA-accredited internship at Wediko Children's Service in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Paster is trained in a variety of treatment modalities including CBT, ACT, DBT, and EMDR and works with people presenting with depression, anxiety, trauma, grief, and life transitions. She also has a focus on working with couples and folks in the LGTBQ+ community. Dr. Paster enjoys spending time with her family, baking, and eating good food.



Date:  March 19, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 717 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: TBA
Speaker:  Gary Rendsburg, Chair in Jewish History at Rutgers University
THIS WILL BE A ZOOM-ONLY MEETING
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE



Date:  April 16, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 718 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: Higher Education, Free Speech, and the Intersection of University Life with Public Policy and Government Relations
Speaker:  Gadi Dechter, Vice President for Communications and Government Affairs, Princeton University
THIS WILL BE A HYBRID MEETING (in-person at TJC & via Zoom)
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE
Gadi Dechter became Vice President for Communications and Government Affairs on January 10, 2022. He provides strategic communications and federal relations advice to the President and other senior University leaders, communicating about and advocating for the priorities of Princeton and higher education more broadly. He oversees the offices of communications and government affairs (located in Washington, D.C.). Prior to joining Princeton, he was head of public affairs at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of APCO Worldwide, a communications consultancy. Before that he served in the White House as senior adviser to the White House National Economic Council and National Security Council under President Barack Obama. He has also served as deputy director of policy and strategic planning at the U.S. Department of Commerce, as managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress, and as a reporter at Bloomberg News and the Baltimore Sun. Dechter received a B.A. in literature from Yale University and a master's degree in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He has held lecturer appointments at George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art.



Date:  April 30, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 719 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: Demographic Snapshots of New Jersey in a Changing Century
Speaker:  Jorge Schement, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Communication Policy at Rutgers University
THIS WILL BE A ZOOM-ONLY MEETING
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE
This presentation will address demographic changes in New Jersey through the lens of population diversity and higher education.
  • Overview of the nation's population trends: population growth; ethnicity; immigration; age cohorts.
  • New Jersey's changing population: age, ethnicity, women and minority entrepreneurship, segregation and communities; statewide inclusion and multiculturalism.
  • Evolving higher education in New Jersey: demand for university education; diversity of student populations; foreign student trends; faculty diversity profiles.
  • New Jersey's coming tension over DEI: diversity in New Jersey's communities, in higher education.
Conclusion: how will New Jersey address its tensions and challenges to DEI initiatives as its population evolves, and as its communities and universities respond? I welcome a conversation that explores the origins, meaning, and political challenges to DEI.
Jorge Reina Schement is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Communication Policy in the Dept. of Journalism and Media Studies (JMS), School of Communication and Information (SC&I) with affiliations in American Studies and Latino Studies at Rutgers University. He previously served as the first Vice President, and Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion for RU-New Brunswick and for Rutgers Biological and Health Sciences. He also served as Dean of SC&I, and chaired the Executive Planning Committee for Rutgers' 250th Anniversary celebration. He was a Distinguished Professor, and cofounder of the Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University. Schement holds a PhD from Stanford University, an MS from the University of Illinois, and a BBA from SMU. He is author of over 250 books, papers, and articles. He served on President George W. Bush's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Technology Advisory Committee for Governor Jerry Brown of California, and authored the telecommunications policy agenda for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He is a founding member of the FCC Federal Advisory Committee on Diversity in the Digital Age. He served as an advisor to the FCC Transition Team for President Barack Obama, and for President Joe Biden. He is currently working on a memoir project and posts draft essays to his Facebook page.



Date:  May 7, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 720 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: Mapping the complexity of artificial intelligence using the tools of cognitive science
Speaker:  Tom Griffiths, Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture in the Departments of Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton University; Director of the AI Lab
THIS WILL BE A HYBRID MEETING (in-person at TJC & via Zoom)
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE
Rapid progress in artificial intelligence research has led many to predict that we will soon have superhuman artificial general intelligences. I will argue that a more realistic outcome is that we will create systems that are heterogeneously superintelligent, outperforming humans in a wide range of settings but also systematically underperforming in others. I will also argue that the tools we need for understanding this heterogeneity can be found in cognitive science, where researchers have spent decades developing theoretical and empirical methods for making sense of the capabilities of intelligent systems. I will illustrate this argument by discussing some surprising cases where large language models perform poorly in predictable ways and recent results showing that both the classic phenomenon of neural networks being insufficiently discrete and the classic phenomenon of thought being overly discrete result in deficits in the performance of AI systems.
Prof Griffiths' research explores connections between human and machine learning, using ideas from statistics and artificial intelligence to understand how people solve the challenging computational problems they encounter in everyday life. He has made contributions to the development of Bayesian models of cognition, probabilistic machine learning, nonparametric Bayesian statistics, and models of cultural evolution, and his recent work has demonstrated how methods from cognitive science can shed light on modern artificial intelligence systems. Prof Griffiths completed his PhD in Psychology at Stanford University in 2005, and taught at Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley before moving to Princeton. He has received awards for his research from organizations ranging from the American Psychological Association to the National Academy of Sciences and is a co-author of the book Algorithms to Live By, introducing ideas from computer science and cognitive science to a general audience.



Date:  May 21, 2026 at 10 am (Meeting # 721 since 02/13/1986)
Topic: Princeton and the American Revolution: The 10 Crucial Days
Speaker:  Barry Singer, a local historian and author, is a speaker about Princeton and the American Revolutionary War. He is also a long time volunteer with the Historical Society of Princeton
THIS WILL BE A HYBRID MEETING (in-person at TJC & via Zoom)
To join this meeting on Zoom, please click HERE
This is the story of the desperate hours at the end of 1776 when the American Revolution seemed lost. Struggling through unimaginable difficulties, the Continental Army crossed the Delaware on Christmas 1776, winning three battles in 10 days, culminating in the Battle of Princeton on January 3, 1777. These victories changed the course of history and enabled the birth of our free nation.
Barry Singer has been a Princeton area resident for more than 30 years. After retiring from a long career in the financial business, he has followed his passion for Revolutionary War history by teaching at local libraries, senior centers and at Princeton University's Community Auditing Program. Additionally, working for the past 18 years as a volunteer with the Historical Society of Princeton, Barry has also been leading walking tours of this intriguing historic town. To learn more about Barry's activities, visit www.barrysinger.co.



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