City Arts & Lectures

This week, we’ll listen to a conversation with David Mitchell and Pico Iyer, recorded on May 8, 2021. David Mitchell’s many novels include Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks , and Ghostwritten . . His most recent novel, Utopia Avenue, follows the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Mitchell’s stories often weave together the supernatural and the philosophical.  He’s also one of the most struct...

This week,  journalist Michael Lewis is in conversation with his fellow writer and friend Dave Eggers. Michael Lewis is the author of books including Moneyball and The Big Short, and most recently The Premonition: A Pandemic Story . It’s a nonfiction thriller filled with the unforgettable characters that Lewis is known for . His knack for storytelling is also what makes his podcast Against the Rul...

Neil Gaiman has been called one of the modern masters of fantasy writing, but his work includes other genres too, from novels like American Gods and Neverwhere , to song lyrics, and poetry. His groundbreaking series The Sandman was the first comic ever to receive a literary award. It’s now being adapted into a show on Netflix. Coraline , his dark fantasy for children, was made into a movie too. In...

This week, our guest is Neil Gaiman. He’s been called one of the modern masters of fantasy writing, but his work includes other genres too, from novels like American Gods and Neverwhere , to song lyrics, and poetry. His groundbreaking series The Sandman was the first comic ever to receive a literary award. It’s now being adapted into a show on Netflix. Coraline , his dark fantasy for children, was...

This week, our guest is Richard Powers. He’s the author of thirteen novels on everything from neuroscience, to artificial intelligence to the environment. His book, “The Overstory” earned him a Pulitzer prize in fiction. The Financial Times called it “A Great American Eco-Novel.” His latest book is called “Bewilderment”, and it also deals with environmental catastrophe. It’s the story of a widowed...

This week, a conversation between two accomplished multi-disciplinary minds - writer Jennifer Egan and computer scientist and artist Jaron Lanier. Egan won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit from The Goon Squad . Now, a decade later, she’s written a sort of sibling to that book. It’s called The Candy House and it imagines a technology that allows people to access every memory they’ve ever had,...

Musician, actor, and fashion icon Janelle Monáe has long been creating sci-fi worlds through her albums and performances. With her new short story collection The Memory Librarian, Monáe, along with a team of collaborators, expands on the Afrofuturistic world of one of her critically acclaimed albums, Dirty Computer.  Dirty Computer introduced us to a world where people’s memories—a key to self-exp...

This week, our guest is Krista Tippett, host of the On Being podcast. Tippett started the program in 2003.  It features conversations about faith, ethics and moral wisdom. Tippett often begins her interviews by asking guests what their relationship to faith was like growing up. It’s a prompt that grounds them in memory before Tippett takes the conversation into an expansive examination of their vi...

Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the author of four novels and two collections of short stories.  The relatively young author gathered major attention for her novel Fates and Furies – from literary awards to a nod from President Barack Obama.  Her newest novel, Matrix, imagines the life of Marie du France, a medieval writer who became France’s first woman poet. Her work...

Rachel Cusk is a writer of considerable range and depth, and her most recent works, dubbed the Outline Trilogy, embody a new and distinctive style. The novels take the form of a succession of monologues delivered not by the protagonist, but by the people she encounters.  Little is revealed about a central character who serves principally as a conduit for others.  The themes and questions that aris...

This week, our guest is author and academic Azar Nafisi. Her books include Reading Lolita in Tehran and Things I’ve Been Silent About. Nafisi was born in Iran, and first came to the United States to study in the 1970s. After earning her Ph. D., she returned to her home country to teach at the University of Tehran, where in 1981, she was expelled for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil. Naf...

This week, we’re listening back to a conversation on creativity from 2018 with two artists whose work span multiple genres. Boots Riley is the leader of the radical funk/hip-hop band “The Coup,” and the director of the 2018 film “Sorry to Bother You.” Ahmir Khalib Thompson, better known as Questlove, is the drummer and joint frontman for The Roots, author of several books, and as of March 27, 2022...

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was elected to office in 2020 after a campaign focused on improving public safety and reforming the criminal justice system.  Kimberly M. Foxx is the first African American woman to lead the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office –the second largest prosecutor’s office in the country– with a vision for transforming the office into a fairer, more forward-...

We’re celebrating the life of the late Madeleine Albright this week with an encore of her 2008 City Arts & Lectures appearance..  Madeleine Albright was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1937. She and her family were refugees who fled Nazi invaders, eventually emigrating to the US in 1948. Albright went on to earn 8 academic degrees, including both a master’s and doctorate from Columbia Univer...

Journalist Jacob Ward of NBC News talks about our growing reliance on artificial intelligence.  His new book is “The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices, and How to Fight Back”.  He draws on interviews with over 100 scientists, as well as his own reporting on behavior shaping technology.  It’s both an investigation into the negative effects of artificial intelligence and a pla...

Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and was one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. He is co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and a founding teacher of the Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. Over the past 40 years, Kor...

Our guest is Jeremy Denk, one of America’s foremost pianists. Winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and has recently appeared with ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. In addition to phenomenal technique, Den...

This week, we’re celebrating the life of Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist who dedicated his life to caring for the world’s poorest people.  Farmer believed that addressing the social roots of illness was as important as treating its symptoms; so, in addition to direct care, he undertook advocacy work that significantly influenced public health approaches to diseases like tuberculosi...

In January of 2022, after more than three decades on the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced that he’ll retire at the end of the current term, once his successor has been confirmed. Born in San Francisco, Breyer received a BA in philosophy from Stanford, attended Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and earned his law degree from Harvard University. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in...

Wajahat Ali  is a playwright and lawyer who writes and speaks on race, religion, politics, and social justice with insight and humor. He is the author of  The Domestic Crusaders,  the first major play about Muslim Americans post-9/11. In his new memoir,  Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American,  Ali shares stories, both hilarious and poignant, of...

Tongo Eisen-Martin is the current poet laureate of San Francisco. He is the author of  Heaven Is All Goodbyes , published as part of City Lights’ Pocket Poet series, and  someone’s dead already.  Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the c...

Billy Collins is one of the most popular contemporary poets.  His 12 collections include “The Trouble With Poetry” and “The Rain in Portugal”.  He’s known for conversational poems that welcome readers with humor, but often slip in profound observations on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself.  Collins served two terms as the US Poet Laureate, from 2001 to 2003, and was New York Sta...

Temple Grandin is an author and speaker on both autism and animal behavior. She is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, and consults on both livestock handling equipment design and animal welfare. She is the author of many books on animal science and autistic experience, including the bestsellers  Thinking in Pictures  and  Animals in Translation . Her new book,  Navigating...

This week, we reach into the City Arts & Lectures archives for a conversation with E. O. Wilson.   The biologist and author was the world’s leading authority on ants – but he was also often referred to as “the father of biodiversity”.  In addition to significant scientific research, Wilson made major contributions to the public’s understanding of larger issues of science, nature, and conservat...

Painter Wayne Thiebaud is best known for his carefully studied still lifes of ordinary objects such as hot dogs, sweets, and lipsticks. It’s his cherry-topped cakes, lush with frosting, and brightly hued slices of pie that first come to mind for many of his fans. The pleasures of diners and dessert carts, rendered in thick paint, evoke a bygone era. But what could be misinterpreted as  saccharine...