LIVE from the NYPL seeks to excite, provoke, inspire desire, through theatrical conversations, discussions, and real debates. The Public Programs at the NYPL, now known as LIVE from the NYPL, want to oxygenate the Library, to make the lions roar! We create cognitive theater, a theater of the imagination by energizing public discourse, indeed mobilizing the power of dialogue and exchange, exchange which incites passion and the thoughtful examination of ideas. We invite authors and filmmakers, politicians and musicians, food critics and psychoanalysts, philosophers and presidents, to come together around a theme, a book, a film, an organized web of obsessions.

In unique groupings such as Bill Clinton together with John Hope Franklin, author Salman Rushdie with Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch and artist/director Miranda July, Günter Grass and Norman Mailer with Andrew O’Hagan, "rock-star philosopher" Bernard-Henri Lévy with Slavoj Žižek - the Slovanian "Elvis of cultural theory" or director/producer Spike Lee with writer James McBride, LIVE conversations want to enlighten and entertain, refresh and reinvigorate the mind.