A Very Special Evening with Nick Paumgarten and Patrick Radden Keefe

Your ticket to the event includes a copy of Nick's memoir, "The Intangibles," along with beverages and light dessert.
About this Event

Join us for an evening with New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten to celebrate his new memoir , a moving and often hilarious exploration of friendship, parenting, and belonging through the lens of hockey. Paumgarten will be joined in conversation by Patrick Radden Keefe, the bestselling author of Say Nothing, Empire of Pain, Rogues, and London Falling.

Drawing on a lifetime on the ice - from childhood hockey to late-night adult beer leagues and the all-consuming world of youth hockey parenting - Paumgarten explores a game that gives so much and demands so much in return. Along the way, he captures the teammates who become lifelong friends, the camaraderie of men who struggle to express their affection, and the complicated experience of watching your children find their way.

Whether you’re a devoted hockey family, a longtime reader of The New Yorker, or simply someone drawn to stories about the beautiful messiness of being human, we hope you’ll join us for a memorable evening exploring how we find connection, make mistakes, and try to become better versions of ourselves.

PLEASE NOTE: Doors open at 6:30 pm and the event begins at 7 pm. Please plan to arrive on time so you can fully enjoy the evening. To help preserve the intimate atmosphere, doors will close at 7:15 pm, and we won’t be able to admit guests after that time. Thank you so much for your understanding. We look forward to seeing you then!

About Nick Paumgarten & The Intangibles

Over the past two decades, Nick Paumgarten has become one of The New Yorker’s most admired and popular staff writers. He brings to journalism what great novelists bring to fiction: an instinct for character, a respect for complexity, and an eye for the telling moment. The Intangibles is his memoir told through the oddly illuminating lens of hockey. Not a book about hockey, really, but one in which a lifetime of obsessively hanging around the game - as player, parent, son, coach, fan, middle-aged white guy in New York, person of privilege, an imperfect man among other imperfect men - provides a vivid and sneaky-exotic window into a cultish world that hides in plain sight. It’s an alternate realm of aspirational vigor and prolonged boyishness, of plucky brutishness and occasional violence, a haven and a release from the pressures of adulthood and city life.

In The Intangibles - the name of Paumgarten’s beer league team - we meet an array of hockey-crazy men trying to make their way through the world with the baggage that’s been laid on them by the men who came before, and the growing knowledge that they have laid their own baggage on their sons. Striped through the book are surprising veins of vulnerability, reflection, and reckoning.

The Intangibles is also a timely, sharp, and witty exploration of masculinity, of boys and men, and of sons and fathers, of both the toxic and nontoxic kinds. It is a deep, questioning look at a certain world of male friendship, in which sport becomes the common language for a group of men who otherwise might not have one. Paumgarten both explores and undermines some of the mythologies of manhood and sport, while creating a fresh, honest, and funny portrait of men at play, the kind of competitive pursuit that defies logic, age, orthopedics, and the responsibilities of grown-up life.

About Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorkerand the author of the New York Times bestsellers London Falling, Rogues, Empire of Pain (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), and Say Nothing, which received a National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the Twenty Best Books of the Twenty-First Century by The New York Times Book Review. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award, and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He served as an executive producer on the awardwinning FX series Say Nothing and is also the creator and host of the podcast Wind of Change, which The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly named the #1 podcast of 2020.