Join author Eyal Press and Open Society Foundations President Aryeh Neier to discuss Press's critically acclaimed new book, Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times, which has been praised by the New York Times as "a hymn to the mystery of disobedience."

Fifty years after Hannah Arendt examined the dynamics of conformity in her seminal account of the Eichmann trial, Beautiful Souls explores the flipside of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention. Through the dramatic stories of unlikely resisters who feel the flicker of conscience when thrust into morally compromising situations, Eyal Press shows that the boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not by radicals seeking to overthrow the system but by true believers who cling with unusual fierceness to their convictions. Drawing on groundbreaking research by moral psychologists and neuroscientists, Beautiful Souls culminates with the story of a financial industry whistleblower who loses her job after refusing to sell a toxic product she rightly suspects is being misleadingly advertised. At a time of economic calamity and political unrest, this deeply reported work of narrative journalism examines the choices and dilemmas we all face when our principles collide with the loyalties we harbor and the duties we are expected to fulfill.

Aryeh Neier is president of the Open Society Foundations. Prior to joining the Foundations in 1993, he served for 12 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch, of which he was a founder in 1978. Before that, he spent 15 years at the American Civil Liberties Union, including eight years as national executive director. He is the author most recently of The International Human Rights Movement: A History, to be published in May.

Eyal Press is the author of Beautiful Souls. Press was a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation from 2009 to 2011. He is a contributing writer at the Nation and a journalist who has written extensively about politics, social issues, and the world of ideas. His essays, reviews, and feature stories have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, Columbia Journalism Review, and numerous other publications. His first book, Absolute Convictions, a narrative account of the abortion wars that racked the city of Buffalo, NY, was published by Henry Holt in 2006.

Follow him on Twitter @EyalPress. Check out this BBC video about his new book here.

This event is co-sponsored by Open Society Foundations, The Nation Institute, and Public Books.

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