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 to talk to Jonah Wiener, a culture journalist and contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine...
Dec 29, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Robert Sapolsky - Encore
Dec 22, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, and a singular intelligence. His first essay collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us , wa...
Dec 15, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 aging, and a collaboration with Steve Martin called The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z!. O...
Dec 08, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans. On November 22, 2024, Nikole Hannah-J...
Dec 01, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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-called American Dream.” Her debut was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics ...
Nov 24, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 contributor to The New York Times . His commitment to the championing of vegetables, as well as ingredie...
Nov 17, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 , which received a National Book Award, and The Overstory , which received a Pulitzer Prize. Powers’ f...
Nov 10, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Whelan performs the dance portions, which are choreographed by Francesca Harper. Marc Bamuthi Joseph is ...
Nov 03, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an on-stage conversation with Daniel Sokatch, CE...
Oct 27, 2024•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Critics Circle award, Gladwell’s books reveal his endless interests and insights, from the influence of o...
Oct 20, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 decades, adjudicating on major issues like the First Amendment, voting rights, and the environment. David Tat...
Oct 13, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 to AI. On October 1, 2024, Yuval Harari appeared at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to...
Oct 06, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Party and the Wounded Knee Massacre. Most recently, she published the book Democracy Awakening: Not...
Sep 29, 2024•2 hr 33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 question of why the number of diagnoses has soared in recent years. Steve Silberman died on August 29, ...
Sep 22, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 public sectors, including serving as Vice Chair and Commissioner of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and ...
Sep 15, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. On July 24, 2024, Handler came to the KQED Studios in San Francisco to talk to his friend and fellow ...
Sep 08, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 parents lead before their children are born, the choices we make that inform who we become, and what ...
Sep 01, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 the author of bestselling books like Bobos in Paradise and The Social Animal. Like several of his mor...
Aug 25, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 to make his mark at USC film school and to be discovered by Steven Spielberg, but he soon found hims...
Aug 18, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 wanted an abortion. Wallace’s new memoir, Another Word For Love , looks back on his own life, from exper...
Aug 11, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Best known for her 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow , Gabrielle Zevin has moved across many genres and topics, writing young adult novels, dystopian speculative fiction, and stories centered around video games, all exploring modern technology, slut-shaming, and the oppression of women. She has written for The New York Times Book Review and NPR, and received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay for the feature film Conversations with Other Women . As Zev...
Aug 04, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest is writer and philosopher Chloe Cooper Jones, author of the memoir Easy Beauty. Jones was born with sacral agenesis, a rare congenital condition that affects her gait and her stature. In Easy Beauty, she details how that informs her experience of the world – and delivers a powerful philosophical examination of how society thinks about beauty. Jones is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2000 for her profile of Ramsey Orta, the man ...
Jul 28, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Victoria Chang is the author of 8 books of poetry, including “Obit” and “Barbie Chang”, a work of creative nonfiction, and two children’s books. Her newest collection of poems is called “With My Back to the World.” It’s inspired by the art and writing of Agnes Martin, a painter who was an influential part of the abstract art movement beginning in the 1950s. On May 31, 2024, Chang came to the KQED studios in San Francisco to talk to Steven Winn about her creative process and some of the themes in...
Jul 21, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Serj Tankian, lead singer of the heavy metal band “System Of A Down.” Tankian founded the group in 1997, releasing five studio albums, three of which debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200. His solo career also includes work as a painter, composer and filmmaker. The musician’s new book is called Down with the System: A Memoir (of Sorts). On July 21st, 2024, Tankian came to the KQED studios in San Francisco to talk to Zack Ruskin about music and activism – particularly his work in suppor...
Jul 21, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Since their foundational philosophical critique of gender and sexuality, Gender Trouble , Judith Butler has been a singularly important contributor to our contemporary understanding of those categories, including what it can mean to be queer. Butler’s revolutionary cultural influence and constant drive towards better understandings of our world guarantee that they will remain a widely read canonical writer for decades to come. In recent years, Butler’s theoretical and activist work on gender per...
Jul 14, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Artist Kara Walker has investigated race, gender, sexuality, and violence through her installations, paintings, silhouettes, and films. Walker’s art has won awards and is collected by museums around the world. Her work with stereotypes and the history of racial violence has pushed viewers to confront the continuing violence against Black people in America. With beloved writer Jamaica Kincaid, winner of the American Book Award, Walker is publishing An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Childre...
Jul 07, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Author and creator Miranda July isn’t bound by medium nor by expectations. From films like Me and You and Everyone We Know and Kajillionaire, to books like No One Belongs Here More Than You and The First Bad Man, to an iPhone app that reroutes text messages to strangers, July’s powers of creativity and observation are wise, surprising, and always delightful. Her second novel, All Fours , is the story of a woman’s artistic cross-country quest that has already won praise from George Saunders, Emma...
Jun 30, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 The Trees. His newest novel, James, is a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, and has already been toute...
Jun 23, 2024•2 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest today is Maggie Nelson, an author and academic whose deeply personal and analytical writing has covered such topics as gender, sexuality, and freedom. She’s published nine books of poetry, essays, and memoir, including The Argonauts . Many of her books combine or re-imagine genres, like her 2009 work Bluets , a collection of 240 short pieces – ranging from the philosophical to the lyrical – about the color blue. On June 1st, 2024, Nelson came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Fran...
Jun 16, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
