Journalist Jacob Ward of NBC News talks about our growing reliance on artificial intelligence. His new book is “The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices, and How to Fight Back”. He draws on interviews with over 100 scientists, as well as his own reporting on behavior shaping technology. It’s both an investigation into the negative effects of artificial intelligence and a plan for combating them. On March 15, 2022, Jacob Ward talked with Lauren Schiller, host of the radio show...
Mar 20, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and was one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. He is co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and a founding teacher of the Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. Over the past 40 years, Kornfield has taught around the world, led International Buddhist Teacher meetings with the Dalai Lama,...
Mar 13, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest is Jeremy Denk, one of America’s foremost pianists. Winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and has recently appeared with ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. In addition to phenomenal technique, Denk brings a deep knowledge of music history and composition to his performances – and to his writings...
Mar 06, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we’re celebrating the life of Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist who dedicated his life to caring for the world’s poorest people. Farmer believed that addressing the social roots of illness was as important as treating its symptoms; so, in addition to direct care, he undertook advocacy work that significantly influenced public health approaches to diseases like tuberculosis, HIV, and Ebola. On May 23, 2013, Farmer spoke to Adam Hochschild about his nonprofit, Partners in ...
Feb 27, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast In January of 2022, after more than three decades on the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced that he’ll retire at the end of the current term, once his successor has been confirmed. Born in San Francisco, Breyer received a BA in philosophy from Stanford, attended Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and earned his law degree from Harvard University. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1994 by President Clinton. Breyer is known for his pragmatic approach to constitutional law, urging...
Feb 20, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Wajahat Ali is a playwright and lawyer who writes and speaks on race, religion, politics, and social justice with insight and humor. He is the author of The Domestic Crusaders, the first major play about Muslim Americans post-9/11. In his new memoir, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American, Ali shares stories, both hilarious and poignant, of his experience growing up a Muslim Pakistani-American in an effort to inspire a new vision of America’s ...
Feb 13, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tongo Eisen-Martin is the current poet laureate of San Francisco. He is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes , published as part of City Lights’ Pocket Poet series, and someone’s dead already. Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and is the...
Feb 06, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Billy Collins is one of the most popular contemporary poets. His 12 collections include “The Trouble With Poetry” and “The Rain in Portugal”. He’s known for conversational poems that welcome readers with humor, but often slip in profound observations on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. Collins served two terms as the US Poet Laureate, from 2001 to 2003, and was New York State Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. On October 23, 2021, Billy Collins spoke with Steven Winn about his...
Jan 30, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Temple Grandin is an author and speaker on both autism and animal behavior. She is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, and consults on both livestock handling equipment design and animal welfare. She is the author of many books on animal science and autistic experience, including the bestsellers Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation . Her new book, Navigating Autism: 9 Mindsets For Helping Kids on the Spectrum, presents nine strengths-based mindsets necessary to...
Jan 23, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we reach into the City Arts & Lectures archives for a conversation with E. O. Wilson. The biologist and author was the world’s leading authority on ants – but he was also often referred to as “the father of biodiversity”. In addition to significant scientific research, Wilson made major contributions to the public’s understanding of larger issues of science, nature, and conservation. He won the Pulitzer Price twice, for his books “The Ants” and “On Human Nature”. His other popular...
Jan 16, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Painter Wayne Thiebaud is best known for his carefully studied still lifes of ordinary objects such as hot dogs, sweets, and lipsticks. It’s his cherry-topped cakes, lush with frosting, and brightly hued slices of pie that first come to mind for many of his fans. The pleasures of diners and dessert carts, rendered in thick paint, evoke a bygone era. But what could be misinterpreted as saccharine nostalgia is often cut through by a sort of sadness. The blue shadow around a plate … the downward ga...
Jan 09, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we present an archival City Arts & Lectures program recorded in 2010 with the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter, the Reverend Mpho Tutu, in conversation with Roy Eisenhardt. Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu dedicated his life to fighting for basic civil and human rights for all. Born a teacher’s son in South Africa, Tutu followed his father’s path and taught for several years before studying theology. From there, he became the first Black general secretary of the ...
Jan 02, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we reach into the City Arts & Lectures archives for a conversation with Joan Didion. One of the most influential writers of our time, Didion both chronicled and shaped American culture with a sharp, witty, and distinctively Californian sensibility. The Sacramento native graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. Her novels include “Play it as it Lays”, “A Book of Common Prayer”, and “The Last Thing He Wanted”. With her husband John Gregory Dunne, she co-wrote screenp...
Dec 26, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we celebrate the life and work of trailblazing poet, feminist, and cultural critic, bell hooks. bell hooks changed the course of feminism, demanding that the voices of women of color, queer women, and working-class women be included at a time when feminism was seen as a white middle-class movement. Her more than three dozen books, include collections of poetry and essays, and her groundbreaking 1981 book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism . bell hooks died at her home in Kentuc...
Dec 19, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich has written many novels including Love Medicine and The Roundhouse, as well as works of non-fiction, poetry, and children’s books. She’s written extensively on Native American identity, and is the owner of an independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Birchbark Books, which specializes in Native American writing. Her new novel, The Sentence, takes place in such a bookstore. It's a ghost story, set against the real-life backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and...
Dec 12, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week – Jeff Chang talks to Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of today’s foremost investigative journalists. Her reporting on civil rights and racial justice, including school segregation, has earned her numerous awards, chief among them a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project. It’s an ongoing initiative from the New York Times that reframes the way we understand America’s history by examining the modern legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans. On November 29, 2021, Nikol...
Dec 05, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast For this special archive edition of City Arts and Lectures, we present a 2008 interview with the lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim. Since his Broadway debut at age 27 as the lyricist for “West Side Story”, Stephen Sondheim has stretched the conventions of musical theater with sophisticated storylines and complex musicality. Though his work has always been controversial, and met with mixed reviews from critics and audiences, Sondheim’s impact on music theater is undeniable. His landmark show...
Nov 28, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Gary Shteyngart’s new book is “Our Country Friends”, which he began writing during the first month of the pandemic. It’s the story of eight friends who shelter in place at the upstate New York home of a Russian-born American writer. His previous books include “Super Sad True Love Story” and “Absurdistan”. On November 8, 2021, Gary Shteyngart joined Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “Less”, to talk about finding humor in dystopic times.
Nov 21, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 conversa...
Nov 14, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 a...
Nov 07, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Oct 31, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 add...
Oct 31, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Oct 24, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 y...
Oct 17, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Ge...
Oct 10, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 storie...
Oct 03, 2021•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 nov...
Sep 26, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Sep 19, 2021•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Under the pen name Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler is responsible for the beloved thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events and the four-volume All the Wrong Questions , among other books. Mr. Snicket is back with his first book for readers of all ages, a whimsical and philosophical novel that begins with the protagonist Snicket finding a note that informs him: “You had poison for breakfast.” On August 30, 2021, Daniel Handler talked to his sister, the writer Rebecca Handler, about writing a...
Sep 16, 2021•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Andrew Budson is a cognitive and behavioral neurologist, a cognitive neuroscientist, and author. He has written and co-authored a number of books that focus on Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and related disorders –– including his most recent work, Six Steps to Managing Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia , is a guide for families who are navigating caring for a loved one. Budson is incredibly active in his field: he is the founder and medical director of the Boston Center for Memory; Associate ...
Sep 16, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
