Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

We've all been through a lot in the past five years, but it's difficult to figure out what it all means, and how it applies to our shared existence in this democratic experiment. Heather Cox Richardson aims to remedy that. As a historian she has been examining and explaining modern events aided by her deep understanding of history and insight into the forces working for and against democracy. In her new book Democracy Awakening, Heather Cox Richardson looks at the state of American democracy and the forces that have been driving it toward authoritarianism. In whose interest is the obfuscation of history? Who benefits if Americans are turned off or prevented from taking part in democratic acts? Who and what can help change things and rededicate this country to its founding ideals?Join us in person as she explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On November 22, 1963, the visual images of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, arguably the most significant crime in modern day history, were seared into the permanent memories of many who were then young adults, teens or children and have continued through the ages for those who have become obsessed with the president’s death. Sixty years later, the yearning for better answers to the questions why and how continues to produce many absurd new speculations and theories to explain his death.Any detailed review of the evidence in the Warren Commission Report raises so many valid questions that ever since it was issued it has been attacked and undermined, both rationally and irrationally. But in recent years, Mark Shaw says clear answers have emerged through the eyes of Dorothy Kilgallen, the most credible journalist to cover the assassination, in fact, the only one who interviewed Jack Ruby at his 1964 trial.Based on her investigation, and his research, bestselling author Mark Shaw (The Reporter Who Knew Too Much), whose lectures about his six books touching on the assassination have attracted millions of YouTube views, returns to The Commonwealth Club of California to review what we know and what we don’t know. By doing so, the likely range of what really happened is in clearer focus, and the collateral damage to American politics and to luminaries like Kilgallen, Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy are no longer obscured by distortions of history regarding those remembered images.MLF ORGANIZER: George HammondA Humanities Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.More about Mr. Shaw—the author of nearly 30 books whose body of work is being archived by his alma mater, Purdue University—may be learned at www.markshawbooks.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cancel culture—the term and the practice—has left its mark on American culture, business, academia and society at all levels over the past few years. Was it inevitable? Is it permanent? Or is it, as authors Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott argue, a dysfunctional part of how Americans battle for power, status and dominance? They say it is just a symptom of a much larger problem: the use of cheap rhetorical tactics to "win" arguments without actually winning arguments.Drawing on data and research on the phenomenon of cancel culture and how it works, along with many examples of how both the left and the right use it to silence their enemies, Lukianoff and Schlott have concrete steps to offer that they say can reclaim a free speech culture in every realm.Lukianoff and Schlott, authors of the bestselling Coddling of the American Mind, return with their new book The Canceling of the American Mind. Join us to hear their description of cancel culture and their prescription for curing it.NOTESAll in-person attendees will receive a copy of The Canceling of the American Mind compliments of the Ken & Jaclyn Broad Family Fund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Climate affects everyone, but not equally. Those affected first and worst are often the same communities that suffer from housing and income inequality, and climate and societal injustice. Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. has made striving for social, economic, and climate justice his lifelong pursuit. Rising to prominence in the Hip Hop community, Yearwood brought like-minded artists and creatives together to advocate for justice with the Hip Hop Caucus by harnessing the power of film, podcasts and comedy.We discuss the role of his faith, his partnership with billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and the underlying belief in our human ability to keep improving that drives his activism.Guests: Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., CEO, Hip Hop CaucusJacqueline Patterson, Executive Director, Chisholm Legacy ProjectFor show notes and related links, visit our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Arts Member-led Forum and San Francisco Opera’s Department of Diversity, Equity and Community invite you to a powerful and thought-provoking panel discussion. As home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States, the Bay Area might have special interest in the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for music, Omar, by Grammy Award-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens and composer Michael Abels.The production runs November 5–21 at the War Memorial Opera House.A true story of an astonishing journey enshrined in a 200-year-old autobiography of enslaved Islamic scholar Omar Ibn Said in the Carolinas, who publicly records his story in Arabic—evidencing the act of writing as the preservation of identity.Omar is a sweeping canvas of text, Christian and Islamic faith, profoundly realized in Kaneza Schaal’s transcendent production embodying the horrors of the “Middle Passage,” prison life, plantation traumas and creative human spirit.MLF ORGANIZER: Anne W. SmithAn Arts Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Take a walk on the warped side with this in-person program featuring stars in their respective fields.The new book The Warped Side of Our Universe is the result of the collaboration of Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne and award-winning artist Lia Halloran. It brings to vivid life the wonders and wildness of our universe’s “Warped Side”―objects and phenomena made from warped space and time, from colliding black holes and collapsing wormholes to twisting space vortices and down-cascading time. Through poetic verse and otherworldly paintings, the scientist and the artist explicate Thorne’s and his colleagues’ astrophysical discoveries and speculations, with an epic narrative that asks: How did the universe begin? Can anything travel backward in time? And what weird and marvelous phenomena inhabit the "warped side"?In their book, Thorne and Halloran take readers on an Odyssean voyage using epic verse and more than 100 pulsating paintings to shed light on time travel, black holes, gravitational waves and the birth of the universe. Join us in-person to hear them share tales of the warped side.MLF ORGANIZERGeorge HammondA Humanities Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.In Association with Wonderfest.This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We constantly hear about cybercrime in the news, but do you have the knowledge to protect yourself from it? In this talk, information security expert Dr. Carrie Gates will cover the clues that can alert you to something being a scam, along with some of the common types of attacks, such as phishing, smishing and vishing.Dr. Gates joined Bank of America in October 2018 as a senior vice president in global information security. She has established a research program, working in partnership with universities, to pursue longer-term, higher-risk research in the security space that has the potential to improve the bank’s security posture. Her current portfolio includes broad investigations into audio deep fakes, misinformation, smishing, and adversarial machine learning.Previously, Gates has worked at a start-up as a distinguished engineer for both Dell and CA Technologies, and with CERT at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting her research career, she was the systems manager for the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University in Canada. She has more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and has been awarded more than 20 patents in the computer and network security field.MLF ORGANIZERGerald Anthony Harris Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us in-person for a Halloween edition of our political discussion series.At Week to Week, we're dedicated to the lively and informed discussion of politics—with a good sense of humor—as a platform for healthy involvement in the issues that drive our society. The Commonwealth Club's Week to Week Political Roundtable and social hour, now in its 12th year, will take a look at the politics of the day—the issues, the people, and the trends affecting our political world.See other upcoming Week to Week political roundtables, as well as audio and video of past Week to Week programs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The popular image of Edgar Allan Poe is that of a sickly, gloomy, dour fellow obsessed with all things eerie and terrifying. Tragically, both for his personal life and because it reinforced this literary myth, Poe died on October 7, 1849, at just forty, in a painful, utterly bizarre manner that would not have been out of place in one of his own tales of terror. The literary effect of his untimely death was also compounded by the mystery of what happened to him, during the three days he went missing, before he was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, wearing ill-fitting clothes that were not his own. There has been a staggering amount of speculation about the cause of his death, from rabies and syphilis to suicide, alcoholism, and even murder. But many of these theories are based on the caricature we have come to associate with Poe: the gloomy-eyed grandfather of Goth, hunched over a writing desk with a raven perched on one shoulder, drunkenly scribbling his masterpieces. By debunking the myths of how he lived, we intend to come closer to understanding the real Poe.Poe scholar Amy Branam Armiento will discuss select works by the master of the macabre. She will explain the temptations and dangers of linking Poe to his insane narrators and grief-stricken speakers as well as cover some examples of how he incorporated contemporary events into his poems and tales. Drawing upon her scholarship on Poe and women, Armiento will also elucidate the roles women have played in inspiring his writing, restoring his reputation, and sustaining his literary legacy for more than 200 years.Mark Dawidziak will discuss how the grotesque stereotypes about Poe have little basis in fact, and will undercut the many myths and misconceptions that have obscured the versatile, prolific and dedicated artist responsible for such classic works as "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Purloined Letter," "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee." Dawidziak also will examine how Poe’s death, under haunting circumstances that reflect the mystery and horror genres that he took to new heights, has been one of the key factors keeping him alive in the 21st century as one of the best-read and most-recognized American writers.MLF ORGANIZERJolene Huey.NOTESA Humanities Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit has been examining hope and the unpredictability of change for over 20 years. In 2023 she co-edited an anthology called, “It’s Not Too Late,” which serves as a guidebook for changing the climate narrative from despair to possibility. How can we find hope on a warming planet?Guests: Rebecca Solnit, Writer, Historian, ActivistFor show notes and related links, visit our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices