City Arts & Lectures

Ada Limón ’s poems expertly combine brilliant observations of our complex world with a tender sincerity. As a two-term Poet Laureate of the United States, Limón focused on using poetry to connect us more strongly with the natural world. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Startlement: New & Selected Poems; The Hurting Kind, The Carrying; and Bright Dead Things.  Her newest bo...

This week, we’ve gone back into the City Arts & Lectures archives for a 2009 interview with the late conductor, composer, and pianist Michael Tilson Thomas. Tilson Thomas was the music director and conductor of the San Francisco Symphony from 1995 to 2020 - and stayed active as its music director emeritus until the last year of his life. He was known as a champion of contemporary American musi...

Emma Straub plays many roles as a leader in the literary world: independent bookstore owner, award-winning novelist, and children’s book author, to name a few. Straub is a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Times best-seller, and the owner of Brooklyn’s Books Are Magic, where she helps celebrate our vibrant literary world through countless readings and events. Straub’s new novel, American Fantasy , has...

Over the past forty years, Gina Gershon has remained a beloved actress while constantly pushing herself as an artist, adding to her astonishing and diverse resumé. Since her small, breakout performance in Pretty in Pink , Gershon has been best known for her roles in movies (including Bound, Showgirls, Face/Off, The Insider ) and television (including Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Riverdale, Curb Your Enthus...

This program originally aired in 2022.  Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the author of four novels and two collections of short stories.   Her 2022 novel, Matrix, imagines the life of Marie du France, a medieval writer who became France’s first woman poet. On April 12, 2022, Lauren Groff came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk about Matrix with Isab...

This program was originally aired in June 2023.  Abraham Verghese is a best-selling novelist, and a physician whose focus on healing and empathy stands out in an era when technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. His novel Cutting for Stone is the story of twin brothers in Ethiopia coming of age on the brink of the country’s revolution. That book remained on the NYT Bestsellers List...

This week, our guest is Michael Pollan, author of ten books including "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "How to Change Your Mind". Since the 1980s, Pollan has captivated readers on an array of topics, from the consequences of what we eat, to the history and contemporary use of psychedelics. Now, he’s turned his eye towards what might be his biggest subject yet: consciousness. In his new book, "A World...

This is an encore of a program originally broadcast in July 2024.   Since their foundational philosophical critique of gender and sexuality, Gender Trouble , Judith Butler has been a singularly important contributor to our contemporary understanding of those categories, including what it can mean to be queer.  Butler’s revolutionary cultural influence and constant drive towards better understandin...

This is an encore of a program originally distributed in 2024. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and author, and one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals working today. In books like Sapiens , Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century , Harari examines topics like the future of humanity, and the connections between biology, myth, and power.  His latest book is Nex...

Sally Mann is one of the most significant American photographers of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Mann has explored childhood, family, memory, mortality, and the passage of time, often through experimental and historic photographic processes. From At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), a nuanced study of girls on the cusp of adolescence, to h...

This is an encore presentation of a program originally aired in November of 2024.  In this program, two novelists who've created visions of a future after significant climate change...talk about whether their fiction can help shape reality.  Across his life, Richard Powers has been driven by an insatiable curiosity for humans and the world around us. This has led him from budding scientist to awar...

Legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson was one of the most remarkable figures in LGBTQ+ history – central to the Stonewall Riots and the gay liberation movement at large. Her remarkable life story is captured in a new biography by artists and filmmaker Tourmaline. Tourmaline is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work is dedicated to Black trans joy and freedom. She is a T...

The work of acclaimed photographer Meghann Riepenhoff examines our relationship to nature and time, both in subject-matter and process. In projects like Litoral Drift, a series of cameral-less cyanotypes, Rieopenhoff makes use of natural elements like water and sediment. Her art is intentionally vulnerable to weather conditions like wind, and her interest in environmental degradation as well as th...

This is an encore presentation of a program first broadcast in 2023.  In 2000, Jhumpa Lahiri’ s debut short story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies , won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Lahiri has gone on to write other critically acclaimed books, including The Namesake , Unaccustomed Earth , and The Lowland . Her collection Roman Stories centers around...

We’re going back to the archives for a 2019 conversation with Meg Wolitzer, whose best-selling books include The Interestings and The Ten-Year Nap. Wolitzer brings readers deep into the lives of her characters, and her clear prose, is infused with sharp observations about group dynamics and ambition. A feminist thread runs throughout all of her work, particularly in her novel “The Wife,” a satiric...

This week, we’re returning to a conversation with Charlie Kaufman, recorded in 2020. Kaufman is the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind some of the most inventive films of recent years, including “Adaptation”, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, and “Being John Malkovich”.  He’s also directed films including “Synecdoche, New York”.  His work often explores human memory and consciousness, with a...

Writer Carmen Maria Machado discusses “I Who Have Never Known Men”, a 1995 novel by Jacqueline Harpman that was republished in 2022 to great acclaim.  It’s a work of speculative dystopian fiction about a group of women who are apparently the only survivors of a global catastrophe.  Machado wrote the introduction for the new edition, and on December 12, 2025, she came to the Sydney Goldstein Theate...

 Eleanor Coppola (1936 – 2024) was a conceptual artist and documentary filmmaker. She met her husband, Francis Coppola, in 1962, when she worked as Assistant Art Director on his first feature. Dementia 13 . Eleanor went on to make several behind-the-scenes documentaries for films directed by her family. Her books include Notes: On the making of Apocalypse Now and Notes on A Life . At the age of 80...

This is an encore of a program originally broadcast in May of 2025.  Ross Gay is a writer with a mission: to help readers explore the beautiful complexities of joy, gratitude, and delight.  In his essays and poetry, Gay brings his overflowing kindness and relentless eye for details to community gardens, the lives of Black people, the artistry of basketball, and much more. He is the author of the p...

The iconic activist and philosopher Angela Davis has been a major influence in global politics for more than 50 years. Davis first gained fame in the 1960s and 70s through her work within second-wave feminism and Marxist advocacy, specifically fighting against the firing of Communist professors at University of California. More recently, she has fought for prison abolition and spoken out in suppor...

This week, we’re celebrating the life of architect Frank Gehry, with a conversation recorded in 2015.  Widely regarded as one of the most influential designers of the last century, the Canadian-born architect was known for his use of bold shapes and unconventional building materials like titanium, stainless steel, and even chain-link.  Among his most famous projects are the Guggenheim Museum in Bi...

Our guest is Rachel Kushner. Her writing includes novels like The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers , and essays on everything from prison abolition to art theory and motorcycle racing. Her fourth novel, Creation Lake , is Kushner’s take on noir. It follows a young woman infiltrating a French anarchist collective. On December 12th, 2024, Kushner came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco...

Why do people cooperate with one another when they have no (selfish) motivation to do so? Why do we hold onto possessions of little value? And why is the winner of an auction so often disappointed? Hear Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler and his co-author, Alex Imas, discuss these questions, examined in their book The Winner’s Curse , with Michael Lewis. Richard H. Thaler received the 2017 Nobel Pr...

This week, our guest is Padma Lakshmi. As host of shows like Taste the Nation and Top Chef, Lakshmi champions cooks and eaters from across cultures. She’s the author of several cookbooks –  including her newest, Padma's All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond – and the memoir Love Loss and What We Ate. Lakshmi’s passion for social justice causes, as well as her d...

This week, our guest is Salman Rushdie. Over the course of six decades, Rushdie has made a profound impact on literature and free speech. He is the author of fifteen novels, including Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, two short story collections, and six works of nonfiction, most recently, his memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. On November 16, 2025, Rushdie came to the...