City Arts & Lectures

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Jelani Cobb Nov 14, 2021

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Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, historian, and professor of journalism at Columbia, and one of today’s most important public intellectuals. He is the co-editor of a new anthology, The Matter of Black Lives, which compiles New Yorker essays on race in America through time, by writers including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, and Zadie Smith. On November 5, 2021, he came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an on-stage conversation with Jeff Chang and a live audience. They spoke about diversity in the newsroom, the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle, and the findings of a task force created by Lyndon Johnson in the wake of racial riots in the 1960s.

Anita Hill Nov 07, 2021

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In 1991, Anita Hill testified at the Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas. It was an act of enormous bravery, and Hill immediately became a symbolic figure of extraordinary controversy.

Anita Hill’s role in bringing gender-based discrimination to America’s consciousness cannot be understated. In fact, prior to her testimony, sexual harassment simply wasn’t part of our collective consciousness. Her work for fair treatment in the workplace, and for a society free of harassment and violence, continues to this day.

On October 22, 2021, Anita Hill came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to speak with USF law professor Lara Bazelon, about the arc of her remarkable life, and her new book Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.

Susan Orlean Oct 31, 2021

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Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, and The Library Book, returns with On Animals. The book is a collection of essays she’s written for The New Yorker-- where she is a staff writer-- that catalogue her love and wonder of animals. On October 13, 2021, Susan Orlean talked to Steven Winn about her fascination with all kinds of creatures, and some truly bizarre animal owners, like a woman who has twenty-three pet tigers.

Dave Eggers Oct 31, 2021

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Dave Eggers’ books include A Hologram for the King, What is the What, and many more since his breakout memoir in the year 2000, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He’s written a new novel, called The Every. It’s follow up to his 2013 book The Circle, and both take a very skeptical view of technology’s impact not only on our daily lives, but our capacity for focus and empathy.

On September 23, 2021, Eggers talked to Tom Barbash about the problems with big tech and about social media’s addictive and destructive algorithms - and the disappointment he feels when an adult friend or colleague resorts to an emoji to express a serious emotion.

Adam Schiff Oct 24, 2021

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Congressman Adam Schiff represents California’s 28th Congressional District. In his 11th term in the House of Representatives, Schiff currently serves as the Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the nation’s intelligence agencies. In his role as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Schiff led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Before he served in Congress, he worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles and as a California State Senator. His new book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy And Still Could offers a vital inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, and a warning that the forces of autocracy unleashed by Trump remain as potent as ever.

Andrea Elliott Oct 17, 2021

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Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times and a former staff writer at The Miami Herald. In 2012, Elliott set out to report about what it was like to be an unhoused child in New York City. She met 11-year-old Dasani Coates, living in a shelter with her parents and seven siblings. The conditions were unsurprisingly horrible, and the challenges faced by Dasani’s family enormous and multigenerational. Elliott followed Dasani and her family for eight years, and her book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City, weaves together Dasani’s story - including her time at a boarding school designed to help disadvantaged girls escape poverty – with the history of Dasani’s family, tracing the passage of their ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. It’s the story of a fierce, resilient, and overburdened child – and the profound impacts of poverty and racism. On October 5, 2021, Andrea Elliott spoke with Isabel Duffy about the book - what it took to write it and what she’d like readers to take from it.

Mary Roach Oct 10, 2021

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Mary Roach is the author of the books Stiff, Spook, Bonk, Gulp, Grunt, and Packing for Mars, all of which bring her distinctly funny voice to popular science subjects. Her new book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, combines little-known forensic science and conservation genetics, with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, trespassing squirrels, and more of “nature’s lawbreakers,” offering hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat. Roach has written for National Geographic, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine. On September 29, 2021, Mary Roach came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an on-stage conversation before a live audience with Malia Wollan, director of the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship at the Graduate School of Journalism.

Karl Ove Knausgaard Oct 03, 2021

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Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is best known for the autobiographical series “My Struggle.” The six volumes total more than 3,000 pages. And the books manage to be both epic and intimate. In them, Knausgaard meticulously catalogs the minor details of his daily life, like cleaning his father’s house and checking out books at the library. He also tackles fundamental questions about existence -- laying bare his personal relationships and anxieties about family, career, and purpose. The stories move slowly and calmly and their effect on the reader can be almost hypnotic. On September 23, 2021, Karl Ove Knausgaard spoke to Judson True about his newest book, a novel called The Morning Star.

Colson Whitehead Sep 26, 2021

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Colson Whitehead is the only novelist to win a Pulitzer Prize for consecutive books: The Underground Railroad, now a television miniseries directed by Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins, and The Nickel Boys. His novels span a wide range of genres, including satire (Apex Hides the Hurt), post-apocalyptic zombie horror (Zone One), and an autobiographical coming-of-age story (Sag Harbor, which is slated for an HBO adaptation produced by Laurence Fishburne). With his highly-anticipated new heist novel, Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead tries his hand at yet another literary category. On September 17, 2021, Colson Whitehead talked to Alexis Madrigal about his writing before an audience at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco, the first live on-stage program for City Arts & Lectures since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Frances Moore Lappé Sep 19, 2021

Show notes

This week, we’ll hear from Frances Moore Lappé, whose groundbreaking book “Diet for a Small Planet” was controversial when it first came out in 1971. World hunger was a major news topic and a genuine concern; many believed there simply wasn’t enough food to feed the planet. But Lappé argued that hunger wasn’t caused by a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of power among those who go hungry. She believed democracy – and a plant-centered diet – could solve the problem. On September 9, 2021, Frances Moore Lappé spoke to her daughter, Anna Lappé, about what drove her to write the book, and what she’s learned in the intervening 50 years. Anna Lappé is also an author and an advocate for sustainability and food justice.

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