City Arts & Lectures

This program originally aired in 2022.  Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the author of four novels and two collections of short stories.   Her 2022 novel, Matrix, imagines the life of Marie du France, a medieval writer who became France’s first woman poet. On April 12, 2022, Lauren Groff came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk about Matrix with Isabel Duffy.  The two also discussed the utterly unique way in which Groff writes her novels.  After copious research, she writes a complete first draft, tosses that away without reviewing it, writes a new draft, and repeats the process again. 

This program was originally aired in June 2023. 

Abraham Verghese is a best-selling novelist, and a physician whose focus on healing and empathy stands out in an era when technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. His novel Cutting for Stone is the story of twin brothers in Ethiopia coming of age on the brink of the country’s revolution. That book remained on the NYT Bestsellers List for over two years. His newest novel, The Covenant of Water, tells much of the story of twentieth-century India through a single family. Verghese’s nonfiction books are My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story and The Tennis Partner. Abraham Verghese is Professor and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University.

On May 11, 2023, Abraham Verghese came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to be interviewed on stage by Michael Krasny, host of the Grey Matters podcast and former host of the award-winning KQED program Forum. Krasny is the author of Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life, Let There Be Laughter, and Spiritual Envy.

This week, our guest is Michael Pollan, author of ten books including "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "How to Change Your Mind". Since the 1980s, Pollan has captivated readers on an array of topics, from the consequences of what we eat, to the history and contemporary use of psychedelics. Now, he’s turned his eye towards what might be his biggest subject yet: consciousness. In his new book, "A World Appears", Pollan examines the nature – and very definition – of consciousness. From cutting-edge neuroscience, to conversations with spiritual practitioners, the book offers multiple perspectives on something as fundamental to our humanity as it is mysterious.
On March 4, 2026, Pollan came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab.

This is an encore of a program originally broadcast in July 2024.   Since their foundational philosophical critique of gender and sexuality, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler has been a singularly important contributor to our contemporary understanding of those categories, including what it can mean to be queer.  Butler’s revolutionary cultural influence and constant drive towards better understandings of our world guarantee that they will remain a widely read canonical writer for decades to come. In recent years, Butler’s theoretical and activist work on gender performance and nonviolence has placed them in conversations around transgender rights, Black Lives Matter, and the Occupy Movement. Their forthcoming book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, examines why recent authoritarian governments and transexclusionary feminists have focused so much of their energy and ire on gender.

On June 13, 2024, Judith Butler came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater to be interviewed on stage by Poulomi Saha,  the co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

This is an encore of a program originally distributed in 2024. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and author, and one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals working today. In books like Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari examines topics like the future of humanity, and the connections between biology, myth, and power.  His latest book is Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks, from the Stone Age to AI.
On October 1, 2024, Yuval Harari appeared at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to technology journalist, author, and podcaster Kara Swisher.