City Arts & Lectures

Poets Clint Smith and Terisa Siagatonu address issues like climate change, while also looking back at American history. Clint Smith is the author of the best-selling narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America and the poetry collection Counting Descent. His latest, Above Ground, traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, particularly Black fatherhood. Terisa Siagatonu is an award-winning poet, teaching artist, mental health educator, and community leader born and rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing blends the personal, cultural, and political in a way that calls for healing, courage, justice, and truth. On April 12, 2023, Clint Smith and Terisa Siagatonu came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco.  

What is “cheating” in the era of generative AI and cognitive enhancers? What rights do we have against institutional misuse of AI and nanotechnology? These technologies have permeated everything from criminal justice to the future of work – and without proper safeguards, they have the power to wreak havoc on our fundamental human rights to privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination. Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, podcast host, and author Preet Bharara (Doing Justice) talks with futurist and legal ethicist Nita Farahany (The Battle for Your Brain) about these questions, and how we can navigate the complex legal and ethical dilemmas that lie ahead. They also discuss the charges against former President Donald Trump. This program was recorded at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on April 6, 2023.

Laurel Braitman is the Director of Writing and Storytelling at The Medicine and the Muse Program at Stanford School of Medicine.  There, she helps clinical students, staff, and physicians communicate more clearly and vulnerably – for their own benefit as well as that of their patients. Braitman is also the founder of “Writing Medicine”, a global community of health care professionals. Her new memoir, What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love, examines grief and chronicles a life spent learning how to outfish fishermen, keep bees, and fix cars – all against the backdrop of a parent with terminal illness. On March 31, 2023, Laurel Braitman came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater for an on-stage conversation with her longtime friend Samin Nosrat.  Nosrat’s a cook, teacher, podcaster, and the author of the cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which became a Netflix series.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon and author who’s well-known for his clear and eloquent writing on medicine. He was a staff writer for “The New Yorker” magazine from 1998 until 2022, when President Biden appointed him to lead global health at the ​​US Agency for International Development. Gawande is the author of four best-selling books including “The Checklist Manifesto,” and most recently, “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End”. In that book, Gawande considers what medicine can not overcome - death. Along with the lessons he’s learned treating patients who are facing death, Gawande writes about his own family’s experience as his father’s health declined. Dr. Gawande’s unique perspective on the practice of medicine, especially things not so often discussed, has inspired us to invite him back to our stage numerous times. This conversation - with cognitive neuroscientist Indre Viskontas - is from 2017. It was recorded at the Nourse Theater in San Francisco.

This week, our guest is Jennifer Egan, who writes with nuance on an astounding range of subjects and disciplines. Her novels include The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, and Manhattan Beach, That intellectual breadth also shows up in her journalism, featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. Her most recent novel, The Candy House, is a sort of sibling to the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, featuring some of that book’s most beloved characters.  It’s set in a near-future in which a technology allows you to access any memory you’ve ever had. From first person plural, to third person, to a chapter written in tweets, The Candy House demonstrates why Egan is one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in recent years.  On March 16, 2023, Jennifer Egan came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to be interviewed on stage by Steven Winn.

For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. His many acclaimed titles include How to Change Your Mind, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire. In his recent essay collection, This is Your Mind on Plants, Pollan takes a deep dive into three psychoactive plants: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. Pollan co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. The center combines research, training, and public education to explore the psychological and biological effects of psychedelics on cognition, perception and emotion. Pollan was interviewed on stage at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on July 26, 2022, by Lauren Schiller. She is the co-author of the forthcoming book It’s a Good Day to Change the World, and the creator and host of Inflection Point, an award-winning podcast and public radio show about how women rise up, build power and lead change.

Tsitsi Dangarembga is a novelist, playwright, activist, and filmmaker. She is the author of the Tambudzai Trilogy, which traces the life of a rural girl from her childhood in colonial Zimbabwe to her adulthood in a country repressed by political elites. The first novel in the series, Nervous Conditions, was “hailed as one of the 20th century’s most significant works of African literature”.  On February 28, 2023, Tsitsi Dangarembga came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater to read from her new essay collection, Black and Female, and to talk with the legendary Black activist Angela Davis.

This week, we’ll dive into the curious world of criminals and crooks with journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the bestsellers Empire of Pain: The Secret of the Sackler Dynasty and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.  Keefe is also the writer and host of Wind of Change, an 8-part podcast which investigates the strange convergence of espionage and heavy metal music during the Cold War. On February 21, 2023, Patrick Radden Keefe came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with KQED’s Mina Kim about his latest book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters Killers Rebels and Crooks, and the reporting process that has made him one of today’s most respected long-form journalists.

This week, our guest is poet Natalie Diaz in conversation with essayist and author Hilton Als.  Natalie Diaz is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community and is the director of the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, where she works with the last remaining speakers of the Mojave language. Language and loss are explored throughout Diaz’s poetry, in collections including When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem, which won her the Pulitzer Prize. Hilton Als is another writer whose work explores American identity, in theater reviews, articles, and essays for The New Yorker, where he’s contributed since 1989. Als received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, “for bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context.”  His writing explores race, sexuality, class, art, and American identity provocatively, exploding the boundaries of the genre in which it is contained.  His most recent book is a memoir, My Pinup. On February 9, 2023, Natalie Diaz and Hilton Als came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation, during which Diaz read from her work.

In a cultural landscape filled with endless pundits and talking heads, Fran Lebowitz stands out as one of our most insightful social commentators. Her essays and interviews offer her acerbic views on current events and the media – as well as pet peeves including tourists, baggage-claim areas, after-shave lotion, adults who roller skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. All of this (and more) is captured in the beloved Netflix series Pretend It’s a City, directed by Martin Scorsese. The New York Times Book Review calls Lebowitz an “important humorist in the classic tradition.” Purveyor of urban cool, Lebowitz is a cultural satirist whom many call the heir to Dorothy Parker. On February 1, 2023, Fran Lebowitz appeared at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco in conversation with Manny Yekutiel and the audience.