City Arts & Lectures

This week, we’ll hear how distance has played a key role in psychotherapy – even before the pandemic. Starting with Freud’s treatments by mail, to crisis hotlines, and now mobile phones and Zoom sessions, therapy has long existed outside the doctor’s office.  Hannah Zeavin calls it teletherapy, and she explores its history in a new book “The Distance Cure”.  On July 17, 2021, Zeavin talked to Adam...

Michelle Zauner is a musician who plays indie pop under the name “Japanese Breakfast”.  Zauner grew up in the Pacific Northwest, raised by her mother, a Korean immigrant.  As an adult, she moved back to become a caregiver at the end of her mother’s life.  Her memoir “Crying in H-Mart” grapples with grief and trauma - but also provides delicious detail about her family’s Korean cooking.  On May 6,...

Lucy Corin is the author of the novel “Everyday Psycho Killers: A History for Girls”, and two short story collections, the most recent being “100 Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses”.  On June 23, 2021, Corin talked with Daniel Handler just before the publication of her second novel, “The Swank Hotel”.  The book explores mental illness, familial grief, and love.

Poet Victoria Chang’s new collection, “Obit”, is about grief and grieving.  Chang wrote the book in the wake of her mother’s death.  The poems are written as obituaries, and their creation gave Chang a way to process her loss and contemplate her own mortality.  Victoria Chang spoke with Daniel Handler on January 19, 2021.

Dr. Jen Gunter is an ob-gyn and a pain medicine physician who writes on topics of sex, science, and social media. A fierce advocate for women’s health, Gunter is devoted to correcting the misinformation perpetuated by the internet around women’s well-being and reproductive health. She is the author of  The Preemie Primer  and  The Vagina Bible . Her new book,  The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Hea...

Twenty years ago, Jhumpa Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants.  She went on to write more short stories, poems, essays, and novels, such as The Namesake.  Since moving to Italy in 2011, Lahiri has worked as a translator of Italian literature, and produce...

Over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, people have faced unprecedented emotional challenges.  Our guests this week are both experts in the relationship between physical and emotional well-being.  Dr. Elissa Epel’s research includes the ways that chronic stress affects the process of aging. She’s a professor of psychology at UC San Francisco.  Dr. Dacher Keltner studies the biological and evolutio...

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...

In 2018, Stacey Abrams lost her bid to be governor of Georgia.  It was a huge disappointment – she was the first Black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee of a major party in the US.  It was also unexpected – Abrams won more votes than any Democrat in Georgia’s history.  The surprise outcome had much to do with the state’s mismanagement of the election.  After she lost, Abrams created the vo...

Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer who’s brought national attention to the failures of America’s criminal justice system. He’s the founding director of the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Alabama.  Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and of the mentally ill, and exonerating innocent Death Row inmates.  We’ll hear Stevenson talk to Chesa B...

  As an activist fighting for racial and social equality, Tamika Mallory has inspired countless others to get involved with these issues – and never more so than when the speech she made during the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis went viral.  Mallory grew up in an activist family; her parents were founding members of the civil rights organization National Action Networ...

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...

Rachel Kushner is the author of several novels including The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers.  Her work has been compared to Joan Didion’s, and that of Don DeLillo, a literary mentor to Kushner. Kushner’s newest book, The Hard Crowd, is a collection of essays from the past 20 years that showcase her intellect and diverse interests, from muscle cars to postmodern art and politics.  She has received...

This week, our guests are Astra Taylor and Robert Reich.  Taylor is an activist, author, and documentary filmmaker whose films include What is Democracy? (2018) and An Examined Life (2008). Last year, at the onset of the pandemic, Taylor joined economist Robert Reich to discuss his just-published book, The System.  It was the very beginning of COVID-19’s complete upheaval of normal life, and Reich...

This week, we present a conversation with choreographer Alonzo King.  He’s the artistic director of LINES Ballet, a contemporary dance company in San Francisco.  He founded it in 1982, and has revolutionized the way we view dance.  King’s choreography includes a blend of powerful and tender emotion, and unbelievable feats of athleticism.  LINES Ballet looks and moves unlike any other ballet compan...

 Playwright Lauren Gunderson’s work is often based on the lives of historical figures – scientists like Marie Curie and Isaac Newton, and political figures such as the first woman elected to Congress.  Gunderson didn’t have to travel far to research her newest play, The Catastrophist – the one-man play centers on her husband, virologist Nathan Wolf. One of Wolf’s areas of expertise – biological th...

This week, we’ll hear a conversation between two writers with unique perspectives on America.  Ocean Vuong is a poet and the author of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.  The story closely mirrors Vuong’s own life: born in Viet Nam, he was two years old when his family left a refugee camp in the Philippines to come to the US.   Tommy Orange published his debut novel, There There, in 2018;...

This week, our guests bring us unique perspectives on life during a pandemic.  Larry Brilliant is a renowned epidemiologist whose work with the World Health Organization helped eradicate smallpox, giving him keen insights into how governments can help tackle global disease. In a new book,  Sometimes Brilliant, he reflects on his remarkable life and his extraordinary experiences as a doctor, innova...

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels  Last Things ,  Dept. of Speculation,  and, most recently,  Weather . One of the pleasures of reading Offill’s books is hearing the emotional struggles and ambivalent attitudes of very honest narrators.  In Weather, the concerns of daily life and parenting combine with the looming apocalypse of climate change. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, the novel ask...

There are over 2 million people incarcerated in the United States – but tens of millions more who are living with criminal records.  This week, we’ll hear about the constraints and challenges faced by formerly incarcerated people.  Reuben Jonathan Miller is a sociologist, criminologist and a social worker who teaches at the University of Chicago in the School of Social Service Administration where...

In this City Arts & Lectures Podcast exclusive, Daniel Handler and Rebecca Handler talk about family and work in a uniquely familiar conversation that only siblings could have. Rebecca Handler  is a writer who lives and works in San Francisco. Her debut novel  Edie Richter Is Not Alone  features a protagonist who moves with her family to Perth, Australia following the death of her father. Ther...

Poet, memorist, and essayist Patricia Lockwood is perhaps best known for her memoir Priestdaddy, an extraordinarily funny account of growing up the daughter of the most singular Catholic priest in America. Lockwood has just published her first novel,  No One is Talking About This , reckons with the feeling of being eternally online, unable to shut off the feed that keeps on scrolling, no matter wh...

This week, our guest is novelist Susan Choi.  She’s the author of five books, most recently “Trust Exercise”. It centers on a group of teenagers at a competitive art school in 1980s suburbia.  What starts out as something straightforward becomes more complex – and with an experimental narrative structure that concludes with a surprise twist.  The book won the 2019 National Book Award for fiction....

Our guest is Lily King, the award-winning author of five novels.  Her 2014 novel “Euphoria” was inspired by the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead.  Last year, King published “Writers and Lovers”, the story of an aspiring author finding her way in the world.  Written with her trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, “Writers & Lovers” explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between th...

Why do humans sleep?  What is sleep’s evolutionary basis? And what is really going on while we sleep?  This week, we broadcast a conversation with cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Walker, talking to Indre Viskontas, originally recorded in 2015.  Walker is an expert in sleep science, and his research reveals that every tissue in the body and every process within the brain is enhanced as we sleep –...