New Yorkers are flocking to lectures. “The current enthusiasm for lectures and spoken-word events calls to mind the 19th century, when crowds flocked to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain and Henry Ward Beecher lecture. At the peak of the country’s lecture craze in the 1850’s, nearly 400,000 people a week attended lectures in the northern and western parts of the country. But why the resurgence now?”