City Arts & Lectures

Our guest today is Judge David S. Tatel.  A former civil rights attorney, Judge Tatel has served for nearly 30 years on America’s second-highest court, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.  It’s where many of American jurisprudence’s most crucial cases are resolved – or teed up for the US Supreme Court.  Tatel has presided over some of the most important trials in recent decade...

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 Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks, from the Stone Age...

Even before her explosively popular Substack Letters from an American, which has grown to more than two million subscribers since it began in 2019, historian Heather Cox Richardson was an important voice in discussions around post-Civil War American history. The author of seven books, Richardson’s writing has focused on race, economics, and political ideology, including the story of the Republican...

This week, we'll hear an encore broadcast of a 2016 appearance by Steve Silberman, a technology reporter whose work helped change the public perception of autism - and popularize the concept of neurodiversity.  Silberman’s 2015 book “Neurotribes - The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity” uncovered a “secret history” of autism.  Silberman also found surprising answers to the crucial q...

Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as the 116th Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 2022. She earned both her undergraduate and law degrees with honors from Harvard University, before serving as a clerk for three federal judges, including Justice Stephen Breyer, whose seat on the Supreme Court she would ultimately go on to take. Jackson's career spans both the private and publ...

Our guests today are Daniel Handler and Sarah Manguso. Daniel Handler has written dozens of books – from adult novels like “The Basic Eight” and “Why We Broke Up”, to picture books and other collaborations with visual artists. But, he’s best known as the author of “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Handler wrote the best-selling children’s novels – 13 in total –  under the pen name Lemony Snicket....

Ann Patchett is best known for her award-winning novel Bel Canto, “a book that works both as a paean to art and beauty and a subtly sly comedy of manners” (New York Times). She is also the author of the novels The Patron Saint of Liars, The Dutch House, Commonwealth, and the non-fiction books Truth and Beauty and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Her new novel, Tom Lake , is about the lives p...

This week, our guest is David Brooks. As an Op-Ed contributor to The New York Times, Brooks writes about subjects ranging from politics and foreign affairs, to cultural trends and spirituality. Brooks started as a humorist, penning satires for his college paper, before becoming a film critic and then a reporter at The Wall Street Journal . You can see him regularly on the PBS Newshour. He’s also t...

Long before he directed Wicked, In The Heights , or the groundbreaking film Crazy Rich Asians, Jon M. Chu was a movie-obsessed first-generation Chinese American helping at his parents’ Chinese restaurant in Silicon Valley and forever facing the cultural identity crisis endemic to children of immigrants. Growing up on the cutting edge of twenty-first-century technology gave Chu the tools he needed...

Journalist and podcaster Carvell Wallace regularly contributes to the New York Times Magazine , and has written cover profiles for Rolling Stone , GQ , and Esquire. His intimate, often heartbreaking essays address everything from the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, to the connections between cowboy poetry and forgotten histories of Black people, to the possibility that his mother would have want...

Best known for her 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow , Gabrielle Zevin has moved across many genres and topics, writing young adult novels, dystopian speculative fiction, and stories centered around video games, all exploring modern technology, slut-shaming, and the oppression of women. She has written for The New York Times Book Review and NPR, and received an Independent Spirit Awa...

  Our guest is writer and philosopher Chloe Cooper Jones, author of the memoir Easy Beauty.  Jones was born with sacral agenesis, a rare congenital condition that affects her gait and her stature.  In Easy Beauty, she details how that informs her experience of the world – and delivers a powerful philosophical examination of how society thinks about beauty. Jones is a contributing writer at the New...

Victoria Chang is the author of 8 books of poetry, including “Obit” and “Barbie Chang”, a work of creative nonfiction, and two children’s books. Her newest collection of poems is called “With My Back to the World.” It’s inspired by the art and writing of Agnes Martin, a painter who was an influential part of the abstract art movement beginning in the 1950s.  On May 31, 2024, Chang came to the KQED...

Serj Tankian, lead singer of the heavy metal band “System Of A Down.” Tankian founded the group in 1997, releasing five studio albums, three of which debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200.  His solo career also includes work as a painter, composer and filmmaker.  The musician’s new book is called Down with the System: A Memoir (of Sorts). On July 21st, 2024, Tankian came to the KQED stud...

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 understandings of our world guarantee that they will remain a widely read canoni...

Artist Kara Walker has investigated race, gender, sexuality, and violence through her installations, paintings, silhouettes, and films. Walker’s art has won awards and is collected by museums around the world. Her work with stereotypes and the history of racial violence has pushed viewers to confront the continuing violence against Black people in America. With beloved writer Jamaica Kincaid, winn...

Author and creator Miranda July isn’t bound by medium nor by expectations. From films like Me and You and Everyone We Know   and Kajillionaire, to books like No One Belongs Here More Than You and The First Bad Man, to an iPhone app that reroutes text messages to strangers, July’s powers of creativity and observation are wise, surprising, and always delightful. Her second novel, All Fours , is the...

Before his novel Erasure was adapted into the hit film American Fiction, Percival Everett was already one of the literary world’s most acclaimed talents, appreciated for his inimitable characters and storylines, as well as his uncommon variety of genres. Since Everett’s first novel in 1983, he has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, for Telephone, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for...

Our guest today is Maggie Nelson, an author and academic whose deeply personal and analytical writing has covered such topics as gender, sexuality, and freedom. She’s published nine books of poetry, essays, and memoir, including The Argonauts . Many of her books combine or re-imagine genres, like her 2009 work Bluets , a collection of 240 short pieces – ranging from the philosophical to the lyrica...

Amy Tan is best known for her novels of Asian American life, such as The Joy Luck Club, the Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter.  Now she’s written and illustrated a book inspired by her love of birding.  The Backyard Bird Chronicles tracks the thoughts and lessons gathered through birding, mixing memoir with Tan’s own sketches of birds. Tan’s calm focus on watching and drawing the w...

Justice Stephen G. Breyer returns to the City Arts & Lectures stage to discuss his first book since retiring from the United State Supreme Court, Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism During his 28-year tenure on the United States Supreme Court, which began with his appointment by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Justice Stephen G. Breyer authored 551 opinions. As a l...

Our guest is actor and comedian Tiffany Haddish. Since her breakout role in the movie Girls Trip, she’s been stealing scenes in films like Night School and Bad Trip. Her comedy specials Tiffany Haddish: She Ready! From the Hood to Hollywood! and the Grammy-winning Black Mitzvah are unfiltered, and deeply personal, from stories of failed comedy performances, to being unhoused, to remarkable perseve...

As the 19th and 21st U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy has faced some of the most difficult health crises in recent history. Murthy, appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden, shaped the federal response to the opioid epidemic, the rise of e-cigarettes, the Flint Michigan water crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. He also co-founded Doctors for America, which works to promote more affordable heal...

Doris Kearns Goodwin  is the preeminent scholar of American presidents. For more than 45 years, in books like the Pulitzer-Prize winning  No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt The Homefront in World War II  and  Team of Rivals , the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s film  Lincoln,  Goodwin has informed millions of readers (and politicians) about the history and power of Executive branc...

Activists and organizers Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix have co-written a new book that presents a detailed examination of solidarity, and its potential for creating lasting change. They spoke with Kate Schatz about their book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea at the KQED studios on April 17, 2024.