City Arts & Lectures

Our guest is Ada Limón, the current United States Poet Laureate. Limon has published six books of poetry, including The Carrying , The Hurting Kind, and Bright Dead Things. Limon says that poetry isn’t just meant to be read – it’s meant to be read out loud - and this program also includes her reading several poems. On February 22, 2024, Limón came to The Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco t...

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 Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at UC San Francisco who studies abortion and adoption. Her new book, “Relinquished”, is the culmination of a decade-long study in which Sisson interviewed mothers from across the country who had given their children up for adoption. Sisson examines the myths and realities associated with these mothers – for example, only 14% are teenagers. But the...

Our guest today is john a. powell, an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties. He’s the former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and currently Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California.  powell’s new book is a guide to fostering connections in today’s fragmented society - what powell ca...

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...

Robert Sapolsky - Encore

Since his 2016 debut poetry collection The Crown Ain’t Worth Much , Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing has earned him numerous accolades as a poet, essayist, and music critic. Easily moving from emotionally riveting examinations of Black identities to academic explorations of punk scenes to analyses of contemporary popular artists, Abdurraqib’s work is full of uninhibited curiosity, revolutionary honesty,...

Since 1978, when her very first cartoon appeared in The New Yorker Magazine, Roz Chast has been chronicling modern life’s anxieties and absurdities. Neurotic characters with frizzy hair and mouths agape sit on sofas or walk along New York sidewalks worrying, observing, and making us laugh. Her more than a dozen books include Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, a memoir about her parents...

Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning journalist known for her groundbreaking work on the history and legacy of slavery, including school segregation and educational inequality.  In 2020, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on “The 1619 Project”. A series of articles for a special issue of the New York Times Magazine.  It was part of an initiative to reframe American history by centering the c...

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s first book, The Undocumented Americans , was hailed as not only a radical experiment in creative nonfiction, but also an important, complex portrait of the lives of undocumented people. Villavicencio melds stark memoir with wide ranging essays, conducting meticulous research through traveling around the country to meet “people who’ve paid a steep price for the so-call...

Yotam Ottolenghi is a celebrated chef and bestselling cookbook author. He is the restauranteur and chef-patron of six London-based Ottolenghi delis, as well as the NOPI and ROVI restaurants. He is the author of ten bestselling and multi-award-winning cookbooks, including his latest, "Comfort". Ottolenghi has been a weekly columnist for the Guardian (UK) for over sixteen years and is a regular cont...

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 award-winning author, from Bangkok to the Netherlands, and has helped him win a Pulitzer Prize and a Macarthur Genius Grant. Powers is best known for his novels, including The Gold Bug Variations , named a Time Book of the Year, The Echo Maker ,...

Spoken word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph and dancer Wendy Whelan discuss their remarkable new hybrid performance piece “Carnival of the Animals”, which addresses, among other things, the siege of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, through the lens of Camille Saint-Saens’ 1886 musical composition.   Marc Bamuthi Joseph conceived and wrote the piece, and performs the spoken word portions, and Wendy Wh...

 Our guest today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, an outspoken voice on issues of race and racism.  Coates was catapulted to fame after the publication of his book-length essay “Between the World and Me”.  His new book, “The Message”, features essays that intertwine his first trip to Africa, the banning of his books in South Carolina, and his experiences traveling to Palestine.  On October 23, 2024, Coates ca...

Since the publication of his first book The Tipping Point , Malcolm Gladwell has garnered influence and fame through his fascinating analyses of our world. The New York Times Book Review wrote that “in the vast world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is as close to a singular talent as exists today.” A Guggenheim fellow, and a finalist for both the National Book Award and National Book Criti...

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...