Our guest today is Angela Davis, one of the world’s most important voices for justice. The philosopher and activist came to prominence in the 1960s. Six decades later, Davis is still on the front lines fighting for equality and freedom on a range of issues from prison abolition to racial justice to gender rights. On March 20, 2024, the iconic activist and scholar came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk about her new book "Abolition, Volume 1" with Hilton Als, New Yorker staff writer and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley ..read more

Our guest today is award-winning novelist Tommy Orange. Orange’s debut novel, There There, centered on a Native American experience that is less commonly featured in US literature - the lives of urban Native Americans. It was one of 2019’s most critically acclaimed books, and now, he’s written a followup. It’s called Wandering Stars. This new book features many of the same characters, while tracing the traumatic legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and government-run boarding schools, like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. On February 27th, 2024, Orange came to the Sydney Goldstein ..read more

Our guest today is Tariq Trotter, also known as Black Thought. He’s a founding member of the seminal hip hop band, The Roots and the author of the memoir The Upcycled Self. Trotter’s released more than a dozen albums and these days, he can be seen every week on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.  In his new memoir, Trotter paints a riveting portrait of his childhood in South Philadelphia and life as a young artist, from meeting Questlove in high school to finding his own path in the music industry. On February 24, 2024, Trotter came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to ..read more

Throughout every era of digital technology, from the dot com bubble to artificial intelligence, journalist Kara Swisher has been a key figure in understanding the rapid growth in Silicon Valley, whether reporting for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other major outlets, or as co-host of the podcast Pivot. Swisher is founder of the All Things Digital conference and the technology news website Recode, and the author of three books, including her new memoir, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. On March 7, 2024, Kara Swisher came to the Sydney ..read more

This week, our guest is Ada Limón, he United States Poet Laureate. Limon has published six books of poetry, including The Carrying, The Hurting Kind, and Bright Dead Things. On February 22nd, 2024, Limón came to The Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Alexis Madrigal about the ways in which the natural world inspires her work – from the landscape of her youth in Sonoma County, California, to Kentucky, where she lives today. She also talked about writing a poem to be engraved on a NASA spacecraft that will launch in the autumn of 2024. Limon says that poetry isn’t just meant to ..read more

This week, we reach into the archives for a 2009 appearance by the late A. S. Byatt.  The author and critic published 11 novels, 6 collections of short stories, and 9 volumes of short stories, as well as editing the Oxford Book of English Short Stories and several other anthologies.  Byatt’s best-known novel, Possession, won the Booker Prize and was made into a film; the book she discusses in this City Arts & Lectures appearance, The Children’s Book, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  In 1999, she was made a Dame of the British Empire for her contributions to English lit ..read more

This week, we present an encore of our 2016 conversation with songwriter and musician Paul Simon. Simon has been the recipient of many honors and awards including 12 Grammy Awards, three of which (“Bridge Over Troubled Water”, “Still Crazy After All These Years” and “Graceland”) were albums of the year. In 2003 he was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for his work as half of the duo Simon and Garfunkel. He is in the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Simon and Garfunkel and as a solo artist. He was a recipient of The Kennedy Center Honors in 2002 and was named as one of Time Maga ..read more

Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Benjamin Moser is the author of biographies of Susan Sontag and Claire Lispector. He’ll talk to us about his most recent book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters. It’s about the lives of artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as lesser known figures of the Dutch Golden Age. It’s a coming of age story too; Moser spent twenty years working on the book. He was interviewed on January 18, 2024, arts critic and journalist Steven Winn interviewed Moser in the studio ..read more

Our guest is Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB-GYN and pain medicine physician.  Gunter’s work both as a clinician and a writer, is aimed at helping women understand and care for their bodies.  That includes countering a large amount of misinformation about women’s health - which she does with great wit on social media.  Her books include “The Vagina Bible”, “The Menopause Manifesto” and her newest, “Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation”.  On January 9, 2024, Jen Gunter came to the studios of KQED in San Francisco to talk with Indre Viskontas.  ..read more

Our guest is renowned neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky.  He’s spent his career investigating behavior across the animal kingdom, including humans.  In books like The Trouble With Testosterone and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sapolsky translates decades of research into fascinating stories and lessons accessible to non-scientific audiences. His latest book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works—the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the mo ..read more