ALOUD @ Los Angeles Public Library

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University and author of 'The Attention Merchants,' joins journalist Madeleine Brand for a deep dive into how our attention is monetized. They discuss the rise of attention merchants, exploring history from the Rattlesnake King's advertising antics to the emotional tactics used in modern political campaigns. The conversation addresses the impact of social media algorithms on news and the ethical dilemmas in marketing, revealing how pervasive consumerism influences our society and identity.

What makes a place? The stories of a city are inexhaustible and contradictory as cities themselves are in constant conflict between memory and erasure. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit’s latest work in a trilogy of atlases (New York, New Orleans, San Francisco) portrays the myriad ways we coexist and move through a city depending on our race, gender, age and so much more.  In conversation with architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, Solnit expands our ideas of how cities are imagined and considers how they might look in the immediate future. Join a discussion with two people who have thought deeply about the possibilities of the infinite city.

One of today’s greatest American novelists, bestselling author T.C. Boyle visits ALOUD to take audiences deep inside his electrifying, eco-visionary new novel. An epic story of science, society, sex, and survival, The Terranauts follows the high-pressured lives of eight scientists—four men and four women—closely monitored under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. With characteristic humor and sharp wit, Boyle plays out his real-life environmental concerns as he experiments with the future of humanity.

When Hisham Matar was a university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent critics in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Matar, the author of In the Country of Men, a Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, chronicles his journey home to his native Libya after the fall of Qaddafi in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. Matar shares from The Return, his impassioned new work that weaves the intimacy of a memoir with the suspense of journalism to offer a moving reflection on exile, art, family, and the history of a revolution.

With all the propulsive tension that made Room an international bestseller, Emma Donoghue’s new masterpiece, The Wonder, is a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives. Set in Ireland in the 1850s, an English nurse arrives in a small village to keep watch over a young girl who has been fasting for months and claims to be living only on manna from heaven. Is it a miracle or fraud or something else? Donoghue shares with ALOUD audiences her latest riveting psychological thriller with Ramona Ausubel.

"What happens to revolutionaries in America?" This was the question photojournalist Bryan Shih sought to answer through his lens and the first-person narratives gathered in this powerful new book, Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution, released on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party’s founding. These intimate and rarely-heard stories of rank-and-file party members whose on-the-ground activism—from voter registrars, medical clinicians, and community teachers—contribute missing pieces to a skewed historical record and offer lessons for the future. #BlackLivesMatter activist and organizer Melina Abdullah joins Panthers Ericka Huggins, Norma Mtume, and Phyllis Jackson for an important examination of the past, present, and future of groundbreaking social movements.

Leading chronicler of science and technology and best-selling author of The Information and Chaos, James Gleick visits ALOUD with a mind-bending exploration of time travel through literature and science. His latest book, Time Travel, tracks our cultural, philosophical, technological, and evolutionary understanding of time—from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who, from the electric telegraph to the steam railroad. Novelist Charles Yu, a masterful storyteller who turns time inside out in his fiction, joins Gleick in conversation to delve into the looping paradoxes of the past, present, and future.

Best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker Riad Sattouf shares from his highly anticipated continuation of The Arab of the Future—a recollection of his childhood as his family shuttled back and forth between France and the Middle East. Sattouf’s latest graphic memoir travels to his father’s hometown of Homs, where the young Sattouf attends schools and attempts to dedicate himself to becoming a true Syrian in the country of a dictator. Hear from one of today’s most original voices as Sattouf acutely observes life’s small daily moments while sweeping through issues of politics, religion, and poverty in a voice both darkly funny and piercingly direct.

Following the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds’ newest book of poems, Odes, addresses and embodies love, gender, and sexual politics through the powerful and tender age-old poetic form of the ode. National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis’ stunning poetry debut, Voyage of the Sable Venus, considers the roles of desire and race in the construction of the self through lyrical meditations on the black female figure. Join us as these poets read from their intimate work and interrogate the structure of the body through its pleasures and sorrows, complex aesthetics and universal truths.

Before you cast your ballot this November, join ALOUD for an evening of political takes and takedowns with New York Times Pulitzer-winning columnist Maureen Dowd. The bestselling author has covered Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton since the 90s and now in her new book, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, she plunges into one of the most bizarre and divisive campaigns in modern history. With her trademark cocktail of wry humor and acerbic analysis, Dowd traces the psychologies and pathologies behind this treacherous battle for our nation’s highest office.