City Arts & Lectures

This week, we present an archival City Arts & Lectures program recorded in 2010 with the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter, the Reverend Mpho Tutu, in conversation with Roy Eisenhardt. Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu dedicated his life to fighting for basic civil and human rights for all. Born a teacher’s son in South Africa, Tutu followed his father’s path and taught for sev...

This week, we reach into the City Arts & Lectures archives for a conversation with Joan Didion. One of the most influential writers of our time, Didion both chronicled and shaped American culture with a sharp, witty, and distinctively Californian sensibility.   The Sacramento native graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. Her novels include “Play it as it Lays”, “A Book of Com...

This week, we celebrate the life and work of trailblazing poet, feminist, and cultural critic, bell hooks. bell hooks changed the course of feminism, demanding that the voices of women of color, queer women, and working-class women be included at a time when feminism was seen as a white middle-class movement. Her more than three dozen books, include collections of poetry and essays, and her ground...

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich has written many novels including Love Medicine and The Roundhouse, as well as works of non-fiction, poetry, and children’s books.  She’s written extensively on Native American identity, and is the owner of an independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Birchbark Books, which specializes in Native American writing.  Her new novel, The Sentence, takes place in...

This week – Jeff Chang talks to Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of today’s foremost investigative journalists.  Her reporting on civil rights and racial justice, including school segregation, has earned her numerous awards, chief among them a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project.  It’s an ongoing initiative from the New York Times that reframes the way we understand America’s history by examin...

For this special archive edition of City Arts and Lectures, we present a 2008 interview with the lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim.  Since his Broadway debut at age 27 as the lyricist for “West Side Story”, Stephen Sondheim has stretched the conventions of musical theater with sophisticated storylines and complex musicality.  Though his work has always been controversial, and met with mixed r...

Gary Shteyngart’s new book is “Our Country Friends”, which he began writing during the first month of the pandemic.  It’s the story of eight friends who shelter in place at the upstate New York home of a Russian-born American writer.  His previous books include “Super Sad True Love Story” and “Absurdistan”.  On November 8, 2021, Gary Shteyngart joined Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning...

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, historian, and professor of journalism at Columbia, and one of today’s most important public intellectuals.  He is the co-editor of  a new anthology,  The Matter of Black Lives, which compiles New Yorker essays on race in America through time, by writers including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, and Zadie Smith....

In 1991, Anita Hill testified at the Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas.  It was an act of enormous bravery, and Hill immediately became a symbolic figure of extraordinary controversy.  Anita Hill’s role in bringing gender-based discrimination to America’s consciousness cannot be understated.  In fact, prior to her testimony, sexual harassment simply wasn’t part of our collect...

Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, and The Library Book, returns with On Animals. The book is a collection of essays she’s written for The New Yorker-- where she is a staff writer-- that catalogue her love and wonder of animals. On October 13, 2021, Susan Orlean talked to Steven Winn about her fascination with all kinds of creatures, and some truly bizarre animal owners, like a woman who ha...

Dave Eggers’ books include A Hologram for the King, What is the What, and many more since his breakout memoir in the year 2000, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He’s written a new novel, called The Every. It’s follow up to his 2013 book The Circle, and both take a very skeptical view of technology’s impact not only on our daily lives, but our capacity for focus and empathy. On September...

Congressman  Adam Schiff  represents California’s 28th Congressional District. In his 11th term in the House of Representatives, Schiff currently serves as the Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the nation’s intelligence agencies. In his role as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Schiff led the first impeachment of Donald J....

Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for  The New York Times  and a former staff writer at  The Miami Herald . In 2012, Elliott set out to report about what it was like to be an unhoused child in New York City. She met 11-year-old Dasani Coates, living in a shelter with her parents and seven siblings.  The conditions were unsurprisingly horrible, and the challenges fac...

Mary Roach is the author of the books  Stiff ,  Spook ,  Bonk ,  Gulp ,  Grunt , and  Packing for Mars , all of which bring her distinctly funny voice to popular science subjects. Her new book  Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law,  combines little-known forensic science and conservation genetics, with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, trespassing squirrels, and more of “nature’s lawbreakers,” offeri...

Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is best known for the autobiographical series “My Struggle.” The six volumes total more than 3,000 pages. And the books manage to be both epic and intimate. In them, Knausgaard meticulously catalogs the minor details of his daily life, like cleaning his father’s house and checking out books at the library.  He also tackles fundamental questions about existence...

Colson Whitehead is the only novelist to win a Pulitzer Prize for consecutive books:  The Underground Railroad , now a television miniseries directed by Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins, and  The Nickel Boys . His novels span a wide range of genres, including satire ( Apex Hides the Hurt) , post-apocalyptic zombie horror ( Zone One ), and an autobiographical coming-of-age story ( Sag Harbor , which is s...

This week, we’ll hear from Frances Moore Lappé, whose groundbreaking book “Diet for a Small Planet” was controversial when it first came out in 1971.  World hunger was a major news topic and a genuine concern; many believed there simply wasn’t enough food to feed the planet.  But Lappé argued that hunger wasn’t caused by a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of power among those who go hungry.  She b...

Under the pen name Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler is responsible for the beloved thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events and the four-volume All the Wrong Questions , among other books. Mr. Snicket is back with his first book for readers of all ages, a whimsical and philosophical novel that begins with the protagonist Snicket finding a note that informs him: “You had poison for breakfast.”...

Dr. Andrew Budson is a cognitive and behavioral neurologist, a cognitive neuroscientist, and author. He has written and co-authored a number of books that focus on Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and related disorders –– including his most recent work,  Six Steps to Managing Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia , is a guide for families who are navigating caring for a loved one. Budson is incredibly ac...

This week…. a encore of a 2018 conversation with Michael Pollan. When it was originally recorded in 2018, the idea of using psychedelics for therapeutic intervention was new to many people. Today, just a few years later, treating mental health disorders like depression and PTSD with drugs like psilocybin, LSD or MDMA, better known as a component in Ecstasy, is much more familiar. Some might say it...

Rita Dove was the youngest person ever to be named United States Poet Laureate.  She was also the first African American to hold the title.  Her poems imbue historical events with personal detail and experience.  Dove is also a novelist and acclaimed lyricist.  On August 15, 2021, she talked with Steven Winn about her most recent collection. “Playlist for the Apocalypse”.

Joy Harjo is a performer and writer of the Muskogee Creek Nation. She’s currently serving her second term as United States Poet Laureate.  Much of Harjo’s poetry incorporates indigenous myths.  She also addresses social justice and feminism.  Her newest book is a memoir, “Poet Warrior”.  On August 16, 2021, Joy Harjo talked with Steven Winn about her work.

Alison Bechdel‘s cult following for her early comic strip  Dykes to Watch Out For  grew wildly in response to her family memoirs, the best-selling graphic memoir  Fun Home , adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and  Are You My Mother?  She has become a cultural household name for the concept of the Bechdel Test, a metric used when considering the representation of women in film. Bechdel has...

When journalist Courtney Martin learned that white families in her gentrifying neighborhood in Oakland largely avoided the majority-Black, poorly-rated public school down the street, she began asking why. In  Learning in Public: Lessons For a Racially Divided America From My Daughter’s School,  Martin examines her own fears, assumptions, and conversations with other parents as they navigate school...

Brian Greene is one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists, widely recognized for his groundbreaking discoveries in the field of superstring theory. His ability to clearly communicate cutting-edge science - even bringing humor to abstruse mathematical concepts -- has made Greene a sort of rock star physicist. On February 25, 2020, Brian Greene came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Fra...