No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. There were Nazi plots to hang prominent Hollywood figures like Charlie Chaplin, gun down Jews in Boyle Heights, and plans to sabotage local military installations. As law enforcement agencies were busy monitoring the Reds instead of Nazis, an attorney named Leon Lewis and his ring of spies entered the picture. Acclaimed historian and USC Professor Steven J. Ross’ ne...
Oct 27, 2017•1 hr 2 min
New York Times bestselling author Roz Chast returns to ALOUD with her hilarious new graphic memoir, Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York. Chast is a native Brooklynite and quintessential New Yorker whose street cred is regularly on display in The New Yorker, where she’s published over 1,000 cartoons. But when she moved to the suburbs, navigating life filled with trees instead of garbage was surreal— although her kids would grow up thinking the opposite was true. On the occasion of her daug...
Oct 25, 2017•1 hr 7 min
The essence of who we are is wrapped up in our language. What is human knowledge lost when a language goes extinct? Why should we care? Join ALOUD for a freewheeling conversation among language activists working to reclaim indigenous languages in California and Mexico. For the first time together on stage, this unique group of participants includes master linguist and language preservationist Leanne Hinton; Native California language activist Vincent Medina and Virginia Carmelo; Odilia Romero He...
Oct 22, 2017
“Is there anything Egan can’t do?” asked The New York Times Book Review. In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan masters her first historical novel. Beginning during the middle of the Great Depression, Manhattan Beach follows the story of Anna Kerrigan, a young girl who comes of age with a country at war. Inheriting the role of providing for her mother and sister after her father mysteriously disappears, Anna works at the Brooklyn Na...
Oct 20, 2017•1 hr 7 min
There’s one major aspect of the popular Gold Rush lore that few Californians today know about: during that period, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000, much of the decline from state-sponsored slaughter. Addressing the aftermath of colonization and historical trauma, a leading scholar explores the miraculous legacy of California Indians, including their extensive contributions to our culture today. Join us for a conversation with UCLA historian Benjamin Madley, ...
Oct 11, 2017•1 hr 25 min
Stephen Greenblatt—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World—investigates the life of one of humankind’s greatest stories. His newest book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, explores the enduring narrative of humanity’s first parents. Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Chris...
Oct 06, 2017•1 hr 9 min
In Danielle Allen’s elegiac family memoir, Cuz: On the Life and Times of Michael A., she tries to make sense of a young African American man’s tragic coming-of-age in Los Angeles. Allen, a Harvard professor and author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, became the "cousin-on-duty" when her younger cousin Michael was released from prison. Arrested at fifteen, tried as an adult—three years after his release, Michael was shot and killed. Why? All...
Sep 27, 2017•1 hr 10 min
With the likes of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Mexico has a long tradition of politically engaged public art, which has often depicted—with varying degrees of accuracy—the country’s indigenous population. Two gifted young artists from the collective Tlacolulokos have been commissioned to create a new artwork in the Central Library’s Rotunda in juxtaposition to the 1933 historic Cornwell murals. They will discuss their new work as well as their street-level actions in their hometown of ...
Sep 20, 2017•1 hr 4 min
Two generations of African writers—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, an elder statesman from Kenya, and Richard Ali A Mutu, a young novelist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—discuss the politics of writing in African languages, the vibrancy of the continent’s cultural output, and exciting new trends in East, West, and Central African writing. Thiong’o and Mutu will be joined for a rare look at groundbreaking indigenous voices by David Shook, the founding editor of Phoneme Media and publisher of Mutu’s...
Aug 01, 2017•1 hr 15 min
Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum in Washington, D.C., an advocacy organization promoting the value of immigrants and immigration, sheds new light on our nation’s brewing immigration debate in his timely book, There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. Although U.S. politics are more polarizing than ever, Noorani argues that our issues of immigration are more about culture and values than pol...
Jul 28, 2017•1 hr 1 min
Join us for an electrifying evening of poetry as four bold writers from diverse backgrounds come together on the stage to explore their common experiences of loss through time and history. Navigating losses of home, of life, and of identity—from a family displaced by war to an examination of videos capturing police killing civilians—these local poets will read from their uncompromising work that perseveres despite loss by searching for ways to rise up and recover.
Jul 26, 2017•1 hr 5 min
An award-winning writer of short stories, children’s books, and literary novels, Maile Meloy’s new novel Do Not Become Alarmed is a masterfully executed emotional thriller about what happens when two American families go on a tropical vacation and the children go missing. New York Times bestselling author Marisa Silver’s latest novel, Little Nothing, follows an electrifying story of a girl, scorned for her physical deformity, whose passion and salvation lie in her otherworldly ability to transfo...
Jul 12, 2017•1 hr 5 min
Twenty years after her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, internationally celebrated author Arundhati Roy returns to fiction with a dazzling new novel. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness journeys across the Indian subcontinent—from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war. Braiding together a cast of characters who have been broken by the world they live in and then ...
Jun 30, 2017•1 hr 35 min
From growing up as a devout woman from a modest family in Saudia Arabia to becoming an unexpected leader of a courageous movement to support women’s right to drive, Manal al-Sharif recounts her life’s journey in her ferociously intimate new memoir Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening. When working in the male-dominated field of computer security engineering in her twenties, al-Sharif was labeled a slut for chatting with male colleagues. Her teenage brother chaperoned her on business trips,...
Jun 22, 2017•1 hr 4 min
Alan Alda, the award-winning actor and bestselling author, discusses his decades-long quest to understand the intricacies of communication. With his trademark humor and candor, Alda’s new book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating, chronicles communication breakdowns in his own life from a life-changing misunderstanding with a dentist to learning how to make science relatable to the masses as host of PBS’s Sci...
Jun 13, 2017•39 min
Ever since J. Edgar Hoover died, six weeks before the Watergate break-in, the FBI has had to confront presidents. FBI investigations led to President Nixon’s resignation, indictments of President Reagan’s national-security team, and the impeachment of President Clinton. Now the current administration faces a major counterintelligence case. When the FBI confronts the power of the presidency, America must navigate uncharted waters. Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award,...
Jun 07, 2017•1 hr 20 min
Why do we do the things we do? Author and MacArthur recipient Robert Sapolsky’s game-changing new book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst attempts to answer this very question, one of the deepest questions of the human species. Moving between neurobiological factors, to the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology, to tracing individual’s childhoods and their genetic makeup, to encompassing larger categories of culture, ecology, and evolution, Sapolsky considers millio...
May 26, 2017•1 hr 20 min
From searing stories of suspense to literary novels, historical fiction, and film and television scripts, no other writer today has such a wide-ranging body of work like Dennis Lehane. The international bestselling author and screenwriter is best known for his edgy, morally complex, and effortlessly masterful stories that often take place in his hometown of Boston. Now a resident of Los Angeles, many of Lehane’s novels have been adapted into award-winning films, including Mystic River, Shutter I...
May 24, 2017•1 hr 4 min
Since 1916 when Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves—the powerful aftermath occurring when black holes collide—scientists have been trying to provide evidence of this profusion of energy. However, a telescope cannot record this event—the only evidence is the sound of spacetime ringing. Janna Levin, one of today’s most eminent theoretical astrophysicists and an award-winning writer, recounts the fascinating story of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks of the...
May 19, 2017•1 hr 10 min
Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays—from pheasants with 3D feathers to moonwalking manakins—traits that seem disconnected from selection for individual survival. Culminating 30 years of fieldwork, Richard Prum, the Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and a world-renowned ornithologist, revives Darwin’s long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate ...
May 17, 2017•1 hr 10 min
California poetry has looked to the future, as well as to its complex past and the present, as a way of understanding our place at the edge of the continent. California is about the magic of the land and the promise of possibility— yet the question remains, for whom? Seven contemporary California poets celebrate the diverse poetry of seven distinguished California writers, hoping to provide a lens through which to experience these visions of a life lived in the harsh clarity of a Western light. ...
May 12, 2017•1 hr 12 min
David Francis’ latest novel Wedding Bush Road follows the visceral journey of a young L.A. lawyer called back to his family’s horse farm in rural Australia when his mother falls ill. Offering a uniquely intimate take on the timeless struggle between the past and present, town and country, Francis’ writing is fueled by a deep understanding of characters and landscapes that are worlds apart—he also works as a lawyer based in Los Angeles and spends part of each year on his family farm in Australia....
May 10, 2017•59 min
2017 marks the 25th anniversary of one of contemporary poetry’s most prestigious awards—Claremont Graduate University’s Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, given for poetry volumes published in the preceding year and created to both honor the poet and provide the resources that allow artists to continue working towards the pinnacle of their craft. In a celebration moderated by the Poetry Society of America’s Executive Director Alice Quinn, join us for an evening looking back at 25 years of this special...
Apr 21, 2017•37 min
The Colorado River is a crucial resource for a large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. New Yorker staff writer David Owen, and author of more than a dozen books, delivers his latest work, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, and takes readers on an eye-opening adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico bo...
Apr 19, 2017•1 hr 12 min
War used to be a temporary state of affairs, but in today’s post 9/11-world America’s wars are everywhere and forever. Law professor and Foreign Policy columnist Rosa Brooks’ book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon, traces what happens when the ancient boundary between war and peace is erased. Part reportage and part memoir, this thought-provoking book is directly informed by Brooks’ unconventional perspective—she is a former top Pentagon offic...
Apr 14, 2017•1 hr 15 min
Born in a public library in Morocco where his father was a janitor, Abdellah Taïa is an acclaimed novelist and filmmaker who lives in Paris, but sets his latest novel in his home country. With deep lyricism and erotic energy, Infidels follows the life of Jallal, a young gay Muslim who is the son of a prostitute witch doctor. The mother and son struggle as outsiders inside their Islamic world until Jallal moves to Belgium and becomes a jihadist. Taia discusses this powerful story about love and b...
Apr 13, 2017•1 hr 16 min
You know Cheech as half of the comedy duo Cheech & Chong, and you know him for his memorable roles in Up in Smoke, Born in East L.A., Desperado, The Lion King, and Jane the Virgin, to name a few. But did you know that Cheech—which is not his real name—is also the owner of the most renowned collection of Chicano art in the world? Did you know that before he became a face of the recreational drug movement, he grew up the son of a cop? Did you know that he crushed Anderson Cooper on Celebrity J...
Mar 29, 2017•1 hr 32 min
Elif Batuman, a New Yorker staff writer and author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, offers up a delightfully refreshing coming-of-age story about not just discovering but inventing oneself. Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot begins in 1995 when email is new and Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard where she navigates the strange new worlds of academics, friendships, and falling in love via email. Batuman dis...
Mar 21, 2017•1 hr 6 min
Writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White journeys deep into the world’s oceans in his new book Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean. From investigating the growth of tidal power generation in Chile and Scotland to delving into the threat of rising sea levels in Panama and Venice, join us for this exploration of the current state of our oceans’ infinitely complex and ever-changing ecosystems and the forces that keep our planet’s waters in constant motion.
Mar 17, 2017•1 hr 7 min
Award-winning poet Ocean Vuong’s debut full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, has been hailed by critics for its powerful emotional undertow, sincerity and candor, and “sense of the evanescence of all earthly things” as Michiko Kakutani writes in The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, and now a resident of New York City, Vuong’s poems navigate the overarching worlds of history, sexuality, and humanity with startling precision. Reflecting on how geographical and linguistic ener...
Mar 14, 2017•1 hr 13 min
