On a Thursday night in June, several dozen people crowded onto the back patio at Trident Booksellers & Cafe to hear Jeff Sharlet and Nathan Schneider discuss what Sharlet calls America’s “slow civil war.” The two friends, both writers and professors, explored the role of violence in the country’s deepening political divisions.
One month later, the patio filled again. This time, the speakers were Amia Srinivasan, an Oxford political theorist and author of “The Right to Sex,” and Hermione Hoby, a Boulder-based novelist. Their conversation moved between psychoanalysis and politics, gender and power.
The subjects were heady. The setting was not.
That combination is the idea behind Magic Mountain Talks, a monthly Boulder conversation series devoted to critical theory, aesthetics and politics. Each event pairs a nationally acclaimed writer or thinker with one of the Boulder-based organizers or another public intellectual. Admission is free, drinks are available at the bar and audience members are encouraged to join the discussion. Several talks have reached standing room only.
Magic Mountain Talks take place on the third Thursday of the month at Trident and are produced in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Humanities and the Arts. The series aims to bring the kinds of intellectual conversations often held on university campuses into a casual, public setting.
The idea came from Arne Hoecker, a professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures.
“We really wanted to create a space for people who are interested in critical theory, politics and aesthetics to have conversations in a non-academic space,” Hoecker said.
For Hoecker, the series also helps bridge a persistent divide between the university and the city around it.
“We are so insular and so removed from everything on campus,” Hoecker said. “Humanities needs to open itself up for public debate.”
Inspired by the affordable gathering spaces of 1990s Berlin, Hoecker began imagining how Boulder could host similarly accessible public conversations.
In addition to Hoecker, the Magic Mountain organizing team includes Hoby; Claire Kelley, a Boulder Public Library District substitute library specialist who also works in publishing at Seven Stories Press; Benjamin Kunkel, co-founder of the journal n+1; Júlia Martins Rodrigues, associate director of the Media Economies Design Lab; and Nathan Schneider, a CU Boulder media studies professor and founder of the lab.
Trident’s back patio provides more than a convenient venue. The bookstore and cafe has long been a hub of Boulder’s intellectual and independent literary scene. Its worker-owned structure also aligns with the organizers’ interest in how institutions shape politics and culture.
“A premise of the series is that politics and culture are deeply intertwined,” Schneider said in an email. “Usually that is interpreted as ‘culture feeds politics.’ But I also believe that ownership structures can help expand or contract what is culturally possible. Being in a worker-owned space means that we can freely explore the possibilities of worker liberation without an owner getting nervous, for example.”
“It’s a great opportunity for these big-name authors to be participating in a smaller community space,” Trident book events manager Aspen Everett said.
Keeping the events free is central to the organizers’ vision. So is creating the feeling that attendees are entering a conversation rather than watching a performance.
“It feels very familial in this setting,” Hoecker said. “With such a strong core of friends and people you know, there’s this preexisting culture of conversation, and you get to bring other people into it.”
The organizers have made one other unusual choice: They do not record the talks. In an era when seemingly every public event becomes online content, Magic Mountain is designed to be experienced only by the people in the room.
“Everyone we invite is already somewhere on YouTube,” Hoecker said. “If you want to watch a recording of somebody, you can do that already. This is a local event in a local community. If you miss it, you miss it.”
Since the series began in January, its guests have included Paul Reitter, a translator of a new English edition of Karl Marx’s “Capital”; “Rejection” author Tony Tulathimutte, who discussed gender and comedy in fiction; and novelist Rachel Kushner, who spoke about aesthetics and politics.
Kushner, the series’ inaugural guest, is scheduled to return in February 2027, this time as the person asking the questions.
The events are free, but producing them is not. Organizers pay their guests and rely largely on support from CU Boulder programs and other funders, including the Center for Humanities and the Arts, the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, the university’s 150th Initiative Fund and the Max Carter Foundation.
Hoecker hopes the series itself will become the draw.
“Eventually we want people not to come because there is Rachel Kushner or Tony Tulathimutte,” Hoecker said, “but because it’s Magic Mountain Talks and it’s going to be an interesting event regardless.”
Dates and details for upcoming talks are available at magicmountaintalks.org.
