City Arts & Lectures

This week, our guest is poet Natalie Diaz in conversation with essayist and author Hilton Als.  Natalie Diaz is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community and is the director of the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, where she works with the last remaining speakers of the Mojave language. Language and loss are explored throughout Diaz’s poetry, in collections including When My Broth...

In the first half of this program, literary critic  Carmela Ciuraru  talks about her new book, Lives of the Wives, which shines a light on the lesser-known partners of historic literary giants. Weaving together themes of marriage, power, ego, and equity, this riveting deep dive explores relationship dynamics that are still relevant today. Then, artist and author Paul Madonna, who’s known for combi...

This week, we talk to the authors of two new books – one about our relationship to work, and another one about hospice and art. In the first half of this program, we talk to Simone Stolzoff. He’s the author of a new book, “The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming life from Work”. It takes a critical look at the way work has become so central to our identities - oftentimes at the expense of family, communit...

This week, a conversation with two brothers, both distinguished members of the federal judiciary, Justice Stephen Breyer  and his brother,  Judge Charles Breyer. Stephen Breyer retired in summer 2022 after nearly 28 years as a member of the Supreme Court. Prior to that, he served nearly 14 years as a Court of Appeals Judge. He is especially appreciated for his pragmatism, issuing decisions most of...

This week, a conversation between two unconventional artists, director, visual artist and author, John Waters and Aubrey Plaza, actor, comedian and producer. For nearly 50 years, John Waters has been making subversive films that playfully push all sorts of boundaries - movies like “Pink Flamingos”, “Hairspray”, and “Serial Mom”. Actor and comedian Aubrey Plaza cites Waters as a major influence of...

Ocean Vuong was not quite 30 years old when his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, became a major literary sensation. It’s a coming of age story about a queer Vietnamese refugee, set against a backdrop of violence, poverty, and addiction. Much of it parallels Vuong’s own upbringing. Vuong is also the author of the poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and a new collection, Time...

Epidemiologist Dr. Monica Gandhi will talk about the lessons learned from COVID-19 and why she thinks new vaccines and public health methods make us well-prepared for future pandemics.  It’s the subject of her new book “Endemic: A Post-Pandemic Playbook”. She’s director at Ward 86, the HIV clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, and a professor at the University of California San Francisco.  Thr...

In 2020, Brandon Taylor burst onto the literary scene with Real Life, a novel about a gay black doctoral student and his predominantly white colleagues.  A finalist for the Booker Prize, Real Life offered a comedic take on themes like privilege and prejudice. Taylor followed that with another book about young creatives, the short story collection Filthy Animals. His highly anticipated new novel, T...

Up-and-coming comedian Jamie Loftus has drawn comparisons to Andy Kaufman and Maria Bamford  for work that’s equal parts absurd and intellectual – from a web series born from an exercise with her therapist, to a podcast about the comic strip character Cathy.  Her new book Raw Dog:   The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs , invites you to “grab a dog, lay out your picnic blanket, and dig into the delicious...

By the time Javier Zamora was just five years old, both his parents had fled El Salvador to escape a United States-funded Civil War.  Zamora lived with his grandparents until the age of nine. That’s when he migrated to the U.S. In his debut memoir, Solito, Zamora retells the experience of traveling alone as a young child.  The nine-week odyssey took him across Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran De...

  Our guest is actor and author Tom Hanks. From his breakout role in “Splash,” to his award-winning performances in “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump,” Hanks has mesmerized audiences for nearly four decades.  On May 16, 2023, Tom Hanks came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to be interviewed by activist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs. Always a storyteller, Hank...

Nancy Pelosi  has represented San Francisco in Congress for more than 35 years. She served as the 52nd Speaker of the House of Representatives, having made history in 2007 when she was elected the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House. Pelosi made history again in January 2019 when she regained her position second-in-line to the presidency – the first person to do so in more than six decade...

Award-winning television host and producer Andy Cohen is best known for Watch What Happens Live, Bravo’s late-night interactive talk show, and as executive producer of the Real Housewives franchise. His new memoir, The Daddy Diaries: The Year I Grew Up, details his experience as a glamorous but ultimately human father. Late-night parties are replaced by early mornings, Housewives drama is no match...

Stacey Abrams is a political leader, voting rights activist, and bestselling author. She served as Minority Leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, and she was the first Black woman to become gubernatorial nominee for a major party in United States history.  Abrams has launched multiple nonprofit organizations devoted to democracy protection, effective public policy, and voting rights. She...

Abraham Verghese is a best-selling novelist, and a physician whose focus on healing and empathy stands out in an era when technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. His novel Cutting for Stone is the story of twin brothers in Ethiopia coming of age on the brink of the country’s revolution. That book remained on the NYT Bestsellers List for over two years. His newest novel, The Covenan...

Siddhartha Mukherjee  is the author of  The Gene: An Intimate History,   The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer , and  The Laws of Medicine . Told in six parts and laced with his own experience as a researcher, doctor, and a prolific reader, Mukherjee’s new book  The Song of the Cell , tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that...

Actor Laura Dern has been captivating audiences since her breakout role in Blue Velvet in 1986. Since then, she’s appeared in dozens of films including  Jurassic Park ,  Wild At Heart, Rambling Rose, The Last Jedi, Little Women, and Marriage Story, for which she won an Academy Award. Her television appearances include Enlightened, Twin Peaks: The Return and Big Little Lies . Her new book,  Honey,...

This week, a conversation with theoretical physicist and futurist Dr Michio Kaku. Kaku is a co-founder of string field theory and he's one of today's most recognizable scientists appearing regularly on news programs, documentary films and as host of two weekly radio programs, Exploration and Science Fantastic. In his latest book, Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change E...

Richard Mosse is a photographer and filmmaker who’s documenting some of the world’s most significant environmental and humanitarian crises – and his work lies at the intersection between journalism and conceptual art. For his recent projects, Mosse used military-grade cameras to create detailed images from miles away. It’s a way to humanize his subjects and give new perspective on urgent issues. H...

The definitive account of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the tragic legacy of Timothy McVeigh, leading to the January 6 insurrection, comes from jourrnalist Jeffrey Toobin  (The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court,The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J. Simpson).  In  Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right Wing Extremism , Toobin has combed nearly a million previously...

Poets Clint Smith  and Terisa Siagatonu address issues like climate change, while also looking back at American history. Clint Smith is the author of the best-selling narrative nonfiction book,  How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America  and the poetry collection  Counting Descent . His latest,  Above Ground , traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood,...

What is “cheating” in the era of generative AI and cognitive enhancers? What rights do we have against institutional misuse of AI and nanotechnology? These technologies have permeated everything from criminal justice to the future of work – and without proper safeguards, they have the power to wreak havoc on our fundamental human rights to privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination. Forme...

Laurel Braitman  is the Director of Writing and Storytelling at The Medicine and the Muse Program at Stanford School of Medicine.  There, she helps clinical students, staff, and physicians communicate more clearly and vulnerably – for their own benefit as well as that of their patients. Braitman is also the founder of “Writing Medicine”, a global community of health care professionals. Her new mem...

Atul Gawande is a surgeon and author who’s well-known for his clear and eloquent writing on medicine. He was a staff writer for “The New Yorker” magazine from 1998 until 2022, when President Biden appointed him to lead global health at the ​​US Agency for International Development. Gawande is the author of four best-selling books including “The Checklist Manifesto,” and most recently, “Being Morta...

This week, our guest is Jennifer Egan , who writes with nuance on an astounding range of subjects and disciplines. Her novels include  The Invisible Circus, Look at Me,  and  Manhattan Beach , That intellectual breadth also shows up in her journalism, featured in  The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine,  and elsewhere. Her most recent novel,  The Candy House,  is a sort of...