Skeptics In The Pub - Philly

Ticketing Info: FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Memento Mori ($5/month) and above levels. Eligible members will get an invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member here. For the event description, go here: https://www.morbidanatomy.org/events/2025/3/30/morbid-anatomy-book-club-a-nervous-splendor-by-frederic-morton

Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com. (Video playback of this event is only available to Morbid Anatomy's Patreon members.)

Event Description:
Join death midwife Lisa Cox discuss Atul Gawande’s classic tome Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014). Modern medicine keeps us alive, extends our lives in aging and terminal illness. But what is the cost to quality of life as we approach the end? In this book, physician Atul Gawandi, drawing on experience with patients and his own family, grapples with the question of how to improve quality of life, rather than simply adding quantity, right up to death.

About the Author:

• Dr. Atul Gawande is a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, as well as a Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He's the author of several other books besides Being Mortal, including Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (2002), Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (2007), and The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009).

About the Book Club Leader:

• Lisa Cox is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and Wyoming's Death Midwife, whose practice Hjertehagen Healing Passages provides life transition and support, physical, emotional and spiritual, during and at the end of life and beyond. A Maine native and Wyoming transplant, Lisa holds degrees in History, Education and Political and Soil Science. She has completed the Advanced Shamanic Healing program in Core Shamanism, is currently in the 3 Year Program in Advanced Initiations through the FSS-E in Italy, and completed training through Death Midwife. In addition to her healing practice, Lisa pays the rent by providing exceptional pet care in the community. When not in her healing space or doing "country doctor rounds," she can be found cooking, hiking or snowshoeing, reading, or sitting on a lake in her kayak.

About the Event Host:
This event is hosted by the Morbid Anatomy Blog & Library, a website dedicated to interstices of art and medicine, death and culture. Morbid Anatomy was created in 2007 as a blog by Joanna Ebenstein, a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, writer, lecturer and graphic designer. It later expanded to include a library of lectures, exhibitions, classes, spectacles, symposia, field trips, books, parties, and films. It is best known for its brief incarnation as the critically acclaimed Morbid Anatomy Museum (2013-2016) in Brooklyn, New York.

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Event Cost & Ticket Info:
Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 3:30 pm. Talk starts at 4:30.
To purchase tickets, go to: https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/philadelphia-witches

Event Description:
Get ready for something spellbinding: A look at various depictions of witches as reflections of ideas about female sexuality, independence, agency, and power.

Offering up this pre-Halloween treat will be folklorist Linda Lee, who previously has given excellent talks at the Black Squirrel Club in Philadelphia’s Fishtown on dark Christmas folklore and the goddess Persephone.

We’ll start with an introduction to witches from European folklore, fairy tales, and legends. You’ll learn how they’re generally portrayed as powerful, solitary, and defiant figures who can be either helpful or harmful. They may appear as mothers, helpers who aid a hero on a quest, or monsters to be vanquished. They can represent a threat to the community by snatching children or pilfering cows’ milk.

Individual witches who will be conjured up include the child-eating witch from Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel” and Baba Yaga, the ambiguous witch of Slavic folklore who lives in a hut on chicken legs and flies around with a mortar and pestle.

Lee will then contrast such fictional depictions with the ideas about witches and witchcraft espoused by Christian demonological thought.
You’ll learn how witches are described by early modern sources like Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century treatise on witchcraft which also served as a witch hunters’ manual. Such texts present witches as entirely malevolent figures who gain magical powers through a pact with the Devil (usually signed with menstrual blood). The witches in them are believed to use a special ointment that allowed them to fly to a Witches’ Sabbath, where they dance and perform demonic rituals.

You’ll see how such ideas were visually reinforced through engravings, woodcuts, and drawings, by artists like Albrecht Dürer, that depicted naked women riding broomsticks and dancing with devils.

You’ll come away with a better understanding of why witches are among the most versatile, notorious, and enduring figures from fairy tales and legends and remain an iconic part of contemporary Halloween traditions.

About Profs & Pints:
Profs and Pints ( https://www.profsandpints.com ) brings professors and other college instructors into bars, cafes, and other venues to give fascinating talks on various topics. Lectures are structured to allow at least a half hour for questions. Admission to Profs and Pints events requires the purchase of tickets, either in advance (through the link provided in event descriptions) or at the door to the venue. Please note that your indication on Meetup of your intent to attend an event constitutes neither a reservation nor payment for that event.

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Ticketing Info: FREE to Morbid Anatomy Patreon Members at the Memento Mori ($5/month) and above levels. Eligible members will get an invitation in their Patreon inbox. Become a member here. For the event description, go here: https://www.morbidanatomy.org/events/2025/3/30/morbid-anatomy-book-club-a-nervous-splendor-by-frederic-morton-hhe2s

Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com. (Video playback of this event is only available to Morbid Anatomy's Patreon members.)

Event Description:
Join Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein to discuss Bruce Greyson, MD’s After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. In it, Dr. Greyson—a leading expert on near-death experiences—reveals his journey toward rethinking the nature of death, life, and the continuity of consciousness. He challenges us to consider what NDEs can teach us about the relationship between our brain and our mind, expanding our understanding of consciousness, and of what it means to be human.

About the Author:

• Dr. Bruce Greyson is a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and the former director of The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), at the University of Virginia. He is also a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. During his research of near-death experiences, he has documented many accounts of near-death experiences, and has written many journal articles, as well as participated in media interviews on the subject, playing a crucial role in inviting broader cross-disciplinary scientific inquiry to the field. In addition to being the author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (Macmillan, 2021), he is the co-author of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and co-editor of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Praeger, 2009).

About the Book Club Leader:

• Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based author, photographer, curator and designer who is also the founder and creative director of Morbid Anatomy. Her books include Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life (2024), Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy (2020), Death: A Graveside Companion (2017), The Anatomical Venus (2016), The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (2014, with Colin Dickey) and Walter Potter's Curious World of Taxidermy (2013, with Dr Pat Morris). Her writing and photography have appeared in The New York Times, Women's Studies Quarterly, and V Magazine.

About the Event Host:
This event is hosted by the Morbid Anatomy Blog & Library, a website dedicated to interstices of art and medicine, death and culture. Morbid Anatomy was created in 2007 as a blog by Joanna Ebenstein. It later expanded to include a library of lectures, exhibitions, classes, spectacles, symposia, field trips, books, parties, and films. It is best known for its brief incarnation as the critically acclaimed Morbid Anatomy Museum (2013-2016) in Brooklyn, New York.

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HOW TO WATCH:
This event is $10 for online tickets, and you must register at the link below, at which point you'll be emailed a link to the online event - https://commonwealthclub.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket/#/instances/a0FVb000008MQLpMAO

NOTE: This event is free for members of the Commonwealth Club of California. Membership costs just $10/month and you can cancel at any time. To become a member, go to: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/membership

EVENT DESCRIPTION:
Bestselling author and noted historian Mark Shaw returns to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to discuss his latest research and his newest book. They strengthen his conclusion that New Orleans mafia don Carlos Marcello was the point person pulling the strings behind the murders of JFK and famed journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. And, for the first time, he also links Marcello to the murder of Robert Kennedy. In his previous books, Shaw established the connections between Marcello, Oswald, Ruby and Kilgallen and Marcello’s use of Kilgallen’s lover to silence her before she could expose Marcello’s involvement in the JFK assassination. In his latest book, Abuse of Power, Shaw lays out compelling evidence that Marcello’s pattern of using patsies to exact his revenge culminated in his setting Sirhan Sirhan up to take the fall for the assassination of RFK on June 6, 1968.

Shaw’s new research includes his examination of the JFK assassination records recently released by the federal government. In those files is a December 1985 FBI transcript in which Carlos Marcello was taped “confessing” to his role in JFK’s death: “Yeah, I had the son of a b---h killed. I’m glad I did. I wish I could have done it myself.”

Shaw investigates whether Marcello decided on a similar approach when it became clear in early 1968 that RFK could become president. Shaw says that since Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, had ordered Marcello deported in April 1961, charging him with racketeering, Marcello had no intention of allowing RFK to get in his way again and so had Bobby killed.

Shaw alleges that Marcello used his “associate,” mobster Mickey Cohen, who controlled the Southern California racetracks, including Santa Anita, and knew the layout of the Ambassador Hotel where RFK was killed, to “recruit” 24-year-old Sirhan just as the mafia don had recruited Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate JFK. Evidence for Shaw’s allegation is a never-before-published, eyewitness, video-taped account from John Shear, a celebrated paddock captain at Santa Anita Racetrack. He had hired Sirhan to work as a “hot walker” at the racetrack and considered him “easily manipulated.”

Shortly before RFK was killed, Shear noticed that Sirhan was all dressed up, had money and was hanging around nearby Hollywood Park Racetrack with “two hoodlums” despite being poorly paid and having gambling debts. Shaw says that shortly after RFK’s murder, it was Shear who first identified Sirhan for the LAPD and the FBI from the photo of Sirhan being shown on TV—but Shear was never contacted by either the LAPD or the FBI about Sirhan, pointing to a cover up.

Then, just as twice before regarding JFK’s and Kilgallen’s deaths, the trail of evidence quickly and suspiciously went cold. Join us as Shaw makes sense of the newfound evidence and heats up his call for justice in the murders of JFK, Dorothy Kilgallen and Robert Kennedy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

• Mark Shaw is an investigative reporter, former defense attorney, a former legal analyst for USA Today and CNN, and the author of over 20 books. To date, Shaw has published six books touching on the JFK assassination including Melvin Belli: King of the Courtroom in 2007 and The Poison Patriarch: How the Betrayals of Joseph P. Kennedy Caused the Assassination of JFK in 2013. Nearly three years later, Shaw penned the bestseller, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much (2016) about the life and times and the death of legendary media icon Dorothy Kilgallen and her coverage of the assassination. He followed up that book with Denial of Justice (2018) which exposed never-before-published evidence about the assassination and Ms. Kilgallen being denied justice when she was murdered. He tied these narratives together in his books Collateral Damage: The Mysterious Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen, and the Ties that Bind Them to Robert Kennedy and the JFK Assassination (2021) and Fighting for Justice (2022), and updated his theories with more evidence in his latest book, Abuse of Power (2025).
• George Hammond, the moderator, is a retired lawyer who now serves as the Chairman of the Humanities Forum at The Commonwealth Club of California. He's the author of six philosophical books on issues in rational idealism, theoretical physics, Plato's theory, early Christianity, the Soviet Union, psychology, and constitutional law.

ABOUT THE EVENT HOST:
The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. Every year, they present more than 450 forums on topics ranging across politics, culture, society and the economy. Their stated mission is to be the leading national forum open to all for the impartial discussion of public issues important to the membership, community and nation. To learn more, go to: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/who-we-are
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