City Arts & Lectures

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 –...

Dr. Carl Hart is a neuroscientist and psychologist at Columbia University whose research focuses on the effects of psychoactive drugs on the brain.   He’ll talk about his positions on recreational drug use, which continue to spark controversy and are often at odds with others in his field. Hart’s latest book,  Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, draws on decades of researc...

This week, a conversation with filmmaker Cheryl Dunye.  Dunye first emerged in the 1990’s as part of the “Queer New Wave”, and much of her work explores questions of race and gender, using her own experience as a lens.  Her debut feature film, “The Watermelon Woman”, is now considered a classic of queer cinema, and her style – a mixture of documentary aesthetic and fictive elements – has earned th...

  We’ve long admired Gabriel Byrne for his nuanced performances in films like The Usual Suspects, Miller’s Crossing, and Dead Man, and the television series In Treatment, for which he won a Golden Globe. Byrne’s thoughtful, understated acting style is reflected in his writing.  His new memoir,  Walking with Ghosts,  far from a celebrity tell-all, is an exquisite portrait of an Irish childhood and...

This week, a conversation with two veteran political opinion researchers about the future of polling. They’ll explore to what extent election outcomes can accurately be anticipated. Many believe the predictions before our last two presidential elections were misleading. How much validity is there to that belief? And can polling evolve to better serve us? We’ll hear from Peter Hart and Neil Newhous...

This week, we are presenting an encore of a 2017 conversation with Dr. Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky is a primatologist and neurologist with a unique gift for storytelling.  Oliver Sacks called him “one of the best scientist-writers of our time”.  Sapolsky has spent decades studying primate behavior.  One of his most consuming fascinations is how humans are both the most violent species on earth – as...

This week, a conversation with two of the creators of Ear Hustle, the first podcast created and produced in prison. The show features stories of the daily realities of life inside California’s San Quentin State Prison, shared by those living it. Ear Hustle was launched in 2017; at the time, Earlonne Woods was an inmate at San Quentin. His sentence was commuted in 2020.  Now, Woods co-hosts the pod...

Thomas Keller is the first and only American chef to have two Michelin Guide three-star-rated restaurants, The French Laundry and per se, both of which continue to rank among the best restaurants in America and the world. He is also the author of The French Laundry Cookbook, Bouchon, Under Pressure, Ad Hoc at Home, Bouchon Bakery, and his new book The French Laundry, Per Se. On October 26, 2020, K...

In the past year, journalists have been out in the streets covering racial reckoning and protest.  Inside newsrooms – which are overwhelmingly white – media organizations are beginning to confront inequity in their own ranks.  When journalism is mostly led by a privileged class of white men, what does that mean for the kinds of stories that get covered, missed, or undervalued? On November 20, 2020...

Crosstalk is a two-part series of compiled conversations between City Arts & Lectures guests from the previous three 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.