Amy Tan is best known for her novels of Asian American life, such as The Joy Luck Club, the Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Now she’s written and illustrated a book inspired by her love of birding. The Backyard Bird Chronicles tracks the thoughts and lessons gathered through birding, mixing memoir with Tan’s own sketches of birds. Tan’s calm focus on watching and drawing the wild birds who visit her home makes for a brilliantly composed breath of fresh air. On May 18, 2024, Am...
Jun 09, 2024•2 hr 41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Justice Stephen G. Breyer returns to the City Arts & Lectures stage to discuss his first book since retiring from the United State Supreme Court, Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism During his 28-year tenure on the United States Supreme Court, which began with his appointment by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Justice Stephen G. Breyer authored 551 opinions. As a liberal voice in the federal judiciary, he has played a key role in reforming criminal sentencing pro...
Jun 02, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest is actor and comedian Tiffany Haddish. Since her breakout role in the movie Girls Trip, she’s been stealing scenes in films like Night School and Bad Trip. Her comedy specials Tiffany Haddish: She Ready! From the Hood to Hollywood! and the Grammy-winning Black Mitzvah are unfiltered, and deeply personal, from stories of failed comedy performances, to being unhoused, to remarkable perseverance. On May 15, 2024, Haddish came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco where she spok...
May 26, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast As the 19th and 21st U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy has faced some of the most difficult health crises in recent history. Murthy, appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden, shaped the federal response to the opioid epidemic, the rise of e-cigarettes, the Flint Michigan water crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. He also co-founded Doctors for America, which works to promote more affordable health care, and TrialNetworks, a biotechnology company that helps improve clinical drug trials. Murthy ...
May 19, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Doris Kearns Goodwin is the preeminent scholar of American presidents. For more than 45 years, in books like the Pulitzer-Prize winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt The Homefront in World War II and Team of Rivals , the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, Goodwin has informed millions of readers (and politicians) about the history and power of Executive branch. Before her career as a historian, Goodwin taught at Harvard for a decade, helped Lyndon Johnson draft h...
May 12, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Activists and organizers Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix have co-written a new book that presents a detailed examination of solidarity, and its potential for creating lasting change. They spoke with Kate Schatz about their book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea at the KQED studios on April 17, 2024.
May 05, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast The concept of de-growth - purposefully moving away from an ever-growing gross domestic product as the definition of a successful economy - may seem like a tough sell to Americans. But Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito sees de-growth as part of a new and sustainable way of living that consumes less of the planet’s resources. His new book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto , points an urgent, yet gentle path toward a more equal and less harmful society. On April 20, 2024, Saito talked to Astra Tayl...
May 05, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Beloved for her enchanting, lyrical writing, Anne Lamott takes on the most complex, intimate parts of life with grace and precision. Lamott’s novels and memoirs have be awarded some of the most sought-after literary prizes, and her collection of essays on writing, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life , has become required reading for all authors. Her new book, Somehow: Thoughts on Love , delves into the struggles of love with her trademark honesty and humor, finding the transforma...
Apr 28, 2024•1 hr 3 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...
Apr 21, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and the principal investigator at The Eviction Lab, a research group that published the first-ever dataset of evictions in America, going back to 2000. His Pulitzer-Prize-winner book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City quickly made Desmond one of America’s most important thinkers and activists. His new book, Poverty, By America , broadens the scope of his research, demonstrating how wealthy Americans keep poor peopl...
Apr 14, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 sta...
Apr 07, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, lik...
Mar 31, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 i...
Mar 24, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest is Calvin Trillin. The journalist, humorist, poet, and novelist started his professional career in the early 1960’s at Time Magazine, and soon after became a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he continues to contribute. He also writes for The Nation. He is the author of 32 books, including memoir, novels, verse, and food writing. His new book,“The Lede: Dispatches From A Life in the Press”, collects writings about journalism and its practitioners. This conversation with writer Ste...
Mar 17, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 10, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 03, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest today is Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at UC San Francisco who studies abortion and adoption. Her new book, “Relinquished”, is the culmination of a decade-long study in which Sisson interviewed mothers from across the country who had given their children up for adoption. Sisson examines the myths and realities associated with these mothers – for example, only 14% are teenagers. But the majority live in poverty - over half have an income of less than $5,000 a year, and some experts sug...
Feb 25, 2024•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast This week, a pair of studio conversations with the authors of recently published books. First, New Yorker writer Nick Romeo talks about his new book "The Alternative: How To Build a Just Economy" with Courtney Martin. It examines how people around the world are reshaping economies and businesses to be more equitable and ethical. Then, poet Kaveh Akbar talks with Corey Antonio Rose about his debut novel "Martyr". It centers around a young Iranian-born American coping with grief, addiction, and fa...
Feb 18, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 19...
Feb 11, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 so...
Feb 04, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 28, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 studio...
Jan 21, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jan 14, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tracy K. Smith is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mar s. Her memoir, Ordinary Light , was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Smith found herself soul-searching, and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” In her new book, To Free the Captives...
Jan 07, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, an encore of one of last year’s most popular programs - a conversation between two unconventional artists, director, visual artist and author, John Waters and Aubrey Plaza, actor, comedian and producer. For nearly 50 years, John Waters has been making subversive films that playfully push all sorts of boundaries - movies like “Pink Flamingos”, “Hairspray”, and “Serial Mom”. Actor and comedian Aubrey Plaza cites Waters as a major influence of hers. She's best known for roles in “Parks a...
Dec 31, 2023•1 hr 1 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...
Dec 24, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast NOTE: This program was not broadcast, because as you’ll hear, it contains a lot of explicit language and content - so much that we felt it would be hard to listen to with all the bleeps and edits that would be necessary for the radio. The language in this podcast has NOT been edited or bleeped, so please listen to it with that in mind. Leslie Jones is a three-time Primetime Emmy Award nominee as well as a Writer’s Guild Award and NAACP Award nominee for her work on Saturday Night Live. She has a...
Dec 21, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, earned him the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Now he’s written A Man of Two Faces. It’s a memoir about his family, as well as larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Viet Nam and America. On November 9, 2023, Nguyen came to The Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Shereen Marisol Meraji to talk about the new book - why he chooses to call himself a refugee, not an immigrant - and his conflicted feelings about...
Dec 17, 2023•1 hr 12 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 10, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog. He’s made over 70 movies – most of them documentaries like Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Grizzly Man. Herzog’s style is so distinctive that his films are recognizable practically from the moment they start. His techniques can be controversial too, when it comes to his unusual casting, and his own presence in the stories he’s telling. On Oct 21st, 2023, Herzog came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Caterina Fak...
Dec 03, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
