A Community Speaker Series event, in partnership with the Sun Valley Writers Conference. Registration required. Ruth Reichl, one of our best-known and most well-loved food writers, is the author of five memoirs, including Tender at the Bone and Save Me the Plums. She is also a captivating novelist, and, as you might imagine, her fiction is full of many sensory pleasures. In her delightful new book, The Paris Novel, the protagonist Stella is left with an unusual inheritance: a one-way plane ticket and a note reading “Go to Paris.” But Stella is hardly cut out for adventure; a traumatic childhood has confined her to the strict routines of her comfort zone. Reichl will talk to The Community Library’s executive director, Jenny Emery Davidson, about this novel that celebrates the city she adores and the many reasons for living deliciously, taking chances, and finding your true home. Photo credit: Shannon Greer.

The annual Hemingway Distinguished Lecture is presented each July, honoring the month of Ernest Hemingway’s birth and death. The event celebrates the power of words and the creative spirit in a landscape that Hemingway loved. This year, The Community Library welcomes PERCIVAL EVERETT, a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His latest novel, JAMES, was published in March of 2024 to critical acclaim. His other titles include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The lecture will be presented outdoors on the Library’s Donaldson Robb Family Lawn. Chairs will be set up for this event, so attendees do not need to bring their own. A book signing will follow. This program will be livestreamed, …

Animals use a dizzying array of sounds, smells, colors, dances, electrical fields and seismic vibrations to convince each other to mate. These elaborate courtship signals were a mystery until Darwin’s time—after proposing his theory of natural selection, Darwin was left with the question of how the flamboyant peacock could be shaped by the same process that makes the peahen so perfectly camouflaged. There is now strong support for Darwin’s answer to this question, the process he termed sexual selection, proposing that the courting sex must be elaborate because the courted sex demands it. But how can we study the conversations males and females in non-human animals have about mating? One way to do this is to participate, controlling one side of the conversation with a robot. Gail Patricelli, a professor of evolution and ecology from the University of California Davis, will talk about using robotic females and other technology to study courtship behaviors in the greater sage-grouse, and how such research informs conservation of this iconic North American bird and its habitat. Registration recommended to join us in person, and registration required to receive the Vimeo link to watch online.

Dr. David Adler, president of The Alturas Institute, renowned constitutional scholar and former Professor in the University of Idaho College of Law, will deliver a talk that explores – within a historical context – current tensions in American constitutional law prompted by recent executive orders and interpretations of the Constitution. Adler will review the implications for the rule of law from the current administration’s assertions of executive power, which raise threats to the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the enumeration of powers. Adler will also address the import of the defiance of judicial orders within the context of the duty of the judiciary, as declared by Chief Justice John Marshall, “to say what the law is.” Q & A to follow. This program will be livestreamed and available to watch later on the Library’s Event Archive. Registration recommended to join us in person, and registration required to receive the Vimeo link to watch online.