City Arts & Lectures

Dr. Jessica B. Harris is the preeminent authority on the culinary culture of the African Diaspora.  Harris has spent over three decades studying African food and its migration.  To understand the rich and complex flavors of African American cuisine requires looking at the culinary cultures of the African continent and the slave trade that brought Africans to America. Harris is the author of twelve...

Siddhartha Mukherjee  is the author of  The Gene: An Intimate History,   The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer , and  The Laws of Medicine . Told in six parts and laced with his own experience as a researcher, doctor, and a prolific reader, Mukherjee’s new book  The Song of the Cell , tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that...

Jemele Hill  is the Emmy Award–winning former cohost of ESPN’s  SportsCenter  and 2018 NABJ Journalist of the Year. Hill is a contributing writer for the  Atlantic , where she covers the intersection of sports, race, politics, and culture. She is also the producer of a Disney/ESPN documentary with Colin Kaepernick. She grew up in Detroit, graduated from Michigan State University, and now lives in...

Anand Giridharadas is the author of the international bestseller  Winners Take All, The True American,  and  India Calling.  His new book  The Persuaders  offers an insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy–from disinformation fighters to a leader of Black Lives Matter to Bernie Sanders and Alexand...

Actor and activist Jane Fonda has redefined herself again and again.  Born into Hollywood royalty, she’s been an acclaimed actor, an anti-war activist, a fitness guru, and in her seventies and eighties, a comedic partner to actor Lily Tomlin in the Netflix series “Frankie and Grace”.  Now, at 84, she says she’s never been happier, and we’ll hear why.  In early 2022, she founded the Jane Fonda Clim...

As new information emerges about the impacts of social media and screens on young people, so do new strategies to guide and protect teens. Our guests, Harvard University researchers Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, set out to try and understand more about this complex and complicated issue. Their years of research included interviews with over 3500 teens. And much of what they found - from the te...

This week, a conversation with artist George McCalman. His new book, “An Illustrated Black History”, features 145 Black artists, scientists, and public intellectuals whose enormous contributions to US history are in stark contrast with their frequent absence from the public eye. McCalman envisioned the book as a sort of bible - a compendium that’s accessible to all ages, and with vibrant art that...

A native of Oakland, California,  Leila Mottley  uses her writing as a tool to call for social justice reform and advocate for victims of sexual violence. Her acclaimed poetry has appeared in  Oprah Daily  and  The New York Times , and her incandescent debut novel  Nightcrawling  was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her 2022 Book Club, making Mottley - who is 20 - the club’s youngest author ever. Ins...

For the millions of Americans asking “What can I do?” to dismantle white supremacy comes an answer:  Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book.  The revolutionary antiracism workbook by  W. Kamau Bell  and  Kate Schatz  addresses institutional racism in the United States, giving readers a hands-on understanding of systemic racism, white privilege, and Black disenfranchisement–and what to do about i...

Andrew Sean Greer’s novels include T he Story of a Marriage , The Confessions of Max Tivoli, and a satire of the literary world, Less  - which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018.  Now, he’s out with the followup,  Less is Lost , which catches up with the lovable Arthur Less as he and his pug travel across the country in a rusty camper van on a literary tour. Greer is the winner of t...

Andy Borowitz  is an award-winning comedian and  New York Times  bestselling author. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated from Harvard College, where he became President of the  Harvard Lampoon . In 1998, he began contributing humor to  The New Yorker ‘s “Shouts and Murmurs” and “Talk of the Town” departments, and in 2001, he created “The Borowitz Report,” a satirical news column, which ha...

Angela Garbes ’s first book, Like a Mother,  looked at the science, myths, and inequities surrounding pregnancy and motherhood. Her latest book,  Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change , continues to examine obstacles and injustices faced by parents and other caregivers. In this book, Garbes also looks at her own family’s history as members of the Filipino American community, many of whom are...

Dave Eggers  is the author of many books, including  Zeitoun ,  What Is the What , and  You Shall Know Our Velocity.  In 2000, Eggers made his enormously popular literary debut with his memoir  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  His latest book,  The Every , is a follow-up to his 2013 dystopian novel,  The Circle.  It follows protagonist Delaney Wells as she tries to take down a dangerous...

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...

This week, a story of transformation with Los Angeles chef and restaurateur Keith Corbin. Corbin grew up in Watts, his early years entangled in drugs and gangs. After serving time in one of California’s most notorious maximum security prisons, Corbin experienced the employment challenges all too common for the formerly incarcerated. A model employee at one of his jobs, Corbin was promoted to a man...

This week, we’re going into the City Arts and Lectures archives for highlights from the many times Salman Rushdie has come to San Francisco.  Rushdie is the author of fifteen novels, including Victory City, which is expected to be published in early 2023, as well as non-fiction works and short stories. Of course, he’s much in our thoughts these days after being attacked on August 12th, 2022, minut...

Mohsin Hamid is the author of five novels, including  The Reluctant Fundamentalist,   How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia , and  Exit West.  All display Hamid’s lyrical prose, his acute understanding of some of the most dire conflicts faced by our modern world, and his belief in the immense and near-magical power of fiction. In his newest novel  The Last White Man , Hamid writes about racial met...

For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. His many acclaimed titles include  How to Change Your Mind ,  The Omnivore’s Dilemma , and  The Botany of Desire . In his recent essay collection,  This is Your Mind on Plants , Pollan takes a deep d...

This week, we look at the connection between the state of our bodies and the state of the planet, with physician  Rupa Marya  and journalist  Raj Patel , Their new book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice , draws on Dr. Marya’s work as a physician, as well as scientific research and scholarship on the social and environmental causes of poor health. On July 21, 2022, the two spoke...

An encore of a two-part miniseries from 2020, in which past City Arts & Lectures guests talk across, among, and around one another. In the second half of Crosstalk, our guests discuss genre. What is a novel? What is autofiction? What is poetry, a fable, creative nonfiction, a short story? Does perfect writing exist? Then, some of our writers speak to cancel culture – the contentious concept of...

An encore presentation from 2020: Crosstalk is a two-part series of compiled conversations between City Arts & Lectures guests from recent years discussing literary identity and the sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, act of writing. Guests include Ocean Vuong, Zadie Smith, Marlon James, Ottessa Moshfegh, Tommy Orange, Eileen Myles, Rebecca Solnit, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Crosstalk is prod...

A conversation on the science of sleep and how we can improve it for better health with Dr. Matt Walker. Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science whose research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease. He is the author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreaming and over 100 scientific...

In The Ministry for the Future , science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines a near-future where climate change has wreaked havoc, from severe heat waves, to flooding, limited resources, and a global refugee crisis. It’s a terrifying set of circumstances. But it’s not without hope - and Robinson brings to life a possible path for survival.  Robinson has also published a memoir, The High...

This week, a conversation with one of today’s most beloved and historically imaginative authors: Amor Towles. Towles earned wide critical acclaim and a loyal international audience with his 2016 novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. His new book, The Lincoln Highway, follows four boys on an exhilarating ten-day trip across America, from the farmlands of Nebraska to the bustling streets of New York City. O...

Our guest is writer, scholar, and activist Angela Davis. For more than 5 decades, Davis has been fighting for Black liberation, equal rights for women, queer and transgender people. Davis first received national attention in 1969, after being removed from her teaching position at UCLA for her social activism and membership to the Communist Party. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Want...