Learn about how Harpo, Chico, Groucho (and possibly even Zeppo) brought their high-brow/low-brow brand of slapstick to the seashore.

Can games inspire mystery novels? I had always been mesmerized by horror and mystery, ever since I was a child. After writing "All Your Base Are Belong to Us," my non-fiction history of games, I was continually inspired by the game industry’s best, darkest narratives. I was also thinking about “My Life Among the Serial Killers,” the book Dr. Helen Morrison and I wrote, which became a worldwide bestseller. And I began to study horror and mystery seriously after immersing myself in games like Alan Wake and L.A. Noire. With a detailed slide show for examples, I'll explain how which games directly inspired my book.

Useful and practical advice for: wedding, funeral, antifascist rally, job thing you don't want to do, job thing you DO want to do, creative project, intergalactic tribunal. What an audience wants and needs, how to feel more comfortable, what to say and why, and other stuff that isn't "picture everyone in their underwear." Whether you're catastrophically shy or love attention but are super scatterbrained, I can give you something for the next time you have to get up in front of a room.

Explore the true crime industrial complex that created a serial killer.

Have a refreshment and peruse to the goodies!

It’s about that time that magicians got into a fight with ghosts.

In many ways, the Coney Island of the early 20th century was the Internet of its day, a place where people went to learn and to gawk in equal measure. Among the sideshows and oddities were new mechanical wonders and cutting-edge technologies that had yet to make it into the mainstream. And there was also another exhibit, nestled among the curiosities and the technological demonstrations, that was a little bit of each. Between 1903 and 1943, babies born prematurely were rushed to a state-of-the-art neonatal intensive-care unit—one that happened to also be one of the most popular attractions on Coney Island. Run by a doctor named Martin Couney, it was, for most of its existence, the only facility in the U.S. designed especially for the care of severely premature infants. At a time when most full-term babies weighed approximately six pounds, Couney declared that he had nursed thousands of three-pound babies back to health. Of the roughly 8,000 premature babies brought to him at Coney Island, around 6,500 survived. This illustrated lecture will highlight a fascinating chapter of reproductive medical history, allowing us to examine the nuances between skepticism, showmanship, exploitation and ethical concerns with emerging technology.

Zombies are all around us — zombie bugs, that is. This talk will introduce the eerie yet fascinating scientific phenomenon of real-life zombification in insects, spiders and other invertebrates. You'll meet tiny but deadly zombifiers such as wasps, worms, flies, fungi and viruses; all rewire their victims' brains and transform them into the "walking dead," helplessly following the zombifier's commands and living only to serve the parasite's needs until death's sweet release (and often beyond).

Coney Island has a haunted house ride, but what about the REAL haunted houses of Brooklyn? From Bed-Stuy to Flatbush, Park Slope, Gravesend, Sunset Park, and Marine Park, our borough abounds in countless forgotten, often demolished haunted houses. This virtual history tour will lead you sites of murder, revenge, secret passageways, phantom bellringers, stately families of Old Brooklyn, sin, scandal, and seances. Brought to you by the borough's foremost spooky historian Andrea Janes, founder of Boroughs of the Dead walking tours, and co-author of A Haunted History of Invisible Women and America's Most Gothic.

In 1857, journalist and humor writer Mortimer Thomson, who wrote under the pseudonym Q.K. Philander Doesticks, P.B., wrote a series of articles investigating the "witches" who were fortune tellers practicing the "dark arts." He visited many working-class women in the tenements of the Lower East Side and quite a few who were living on Broome Street. This short book talk will examine the lives of some of these so-called witches and the surprising ways in which they appeared in the press, as well as what they had in common with the peculiar journalist Doesticks who was harboring some secrets of his own.