Midnight Symposium Winter Schedule.

Monday, Jan. 11th
Atul Gawande. THE CHECKLIST MANIFESTO: How To Get Things Right. Click for tickets.

Monday, Feb 8th.
Garry Wills. BOMB POWER: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. Click for tickets.

Tuesday, April 20th
Bill Mckibben. EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Click for tickets

The Midnight Symposium concept is simple: we will continue to host some of the leading intellectuals, artists, and writers of our time for an intimate and casual course on a subject of their choosing.

*Upon confirmation of their reservation guests will receive a pdf of required reading. In a Symposium dialogue is encouraged.

$50/person. Includes a hearty stew, a big bottle of whisky to be shared, and some wine. If you like to drink heavily we encourage you to bring additional bottles. For reservations email: nightschool@hotelsorrento.com


Atul Gawande

A surgeon and a writer, Atul Gawande is a staff member of Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and the New Yorker magazine. He received his B.A.S. from Stanford University, M.A. (in politics, philosophy, and economics) from Oxford University, M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health. He served as a senior health policy advisor in the Clinton presidential campaign and White House from 1992 to 1993. Since 1998, he has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. In 2003, he completed his surgical residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and joined the faculty as a general and endocrine surgeon.

He is also Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Research Director for the BWH Center for Surgery and Public Health. He has published research studies in areas ranging from surgical technique, to US military care for the wounded, to error and performance in medicine. He is the director of the World Health Organization's Global Challenge for Safer Surgical Care.

In 2006, he received the MacArthur Award for his research and writing. His book COMPLICATIONS: A SURGEON'S NOTES ON AN IMPERFECT SCIENCE was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002 and is published in more than a hundred countries. He was editor of THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING 2006. His most recent book, BETTER: A SURGEON'S NOTES ON PERFORMANCE is a New York Times bestseller and one of Amazon.com's ten best books of 2007. He and his wife, Kathleen Hobson, live outside Boston and have three children: Walker, Hattie, and Hunter.


Gary Wills

Garry Wills is a Puitzer Prize winning author, journalist, and historian specializing in American politics, American political history and ideology and the Roman Catholic Church. He has written nearly 40 books and has been a frequent reviewer for the New York Review of Books since 1973.[1]

A conservative and early protégé of William F. Buckley, Jr as a young man, Wills became increasingly liberal through the 1960s, driven by his coverage of the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements. Although a Catholic, he has been an excoriating critic of the Vatican and its policies and theology.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction[4] for Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1993), which describes the background and effect of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. He was awarded the National Medal for the Humanities in 1998. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, including as a co-winner for nonfiction in 1978 for Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.


Bill Mckibben

An American environmentalist and writer, Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign. Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine. Read full bio here.