City Arts & Lectures

Shelley Sella is a board-certified OB-GYN who recently retired after decades as an abortion provider. Her book, Beyond Limits: Stories of the Third-Trimester Abortion Care, looks at one of the most highly politicized areas of medicine, upending many common myths about abortion care and the women who seek it.  On May 21, 2025, Sella came to KQED studios in San Francisco to talk to Gretchen Sisson,  a sociologist and the aut...

In 2017, 37-year-old Jacinda Ardern was elected the 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand, becoming the country’s youngest Prime Minister in more than 150 years and the youngest woman to serve as head of government anywhere in the world.  She was first elected to Parliament in 2008 and left as Prime Minister in 2023. Her tenure as Prime Minister coincided with a tumultuous time in New Zealand, including a mass shooting, a vol...

Thomas Keller has built a collection of restaurants that have set new standards in the hospitality profession. As the first American-born chef to receive multiple three-star ratings from the Michelin Guide for The French Laundry and Per Se and one star for The Surf Club Restaurant, he is the most recognized American chef by Michelin. In 2011, he was designated a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, the first American m...

Alison Bechdel‘s cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For grew wildly in response to her graphic memoirs, the best-selling Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, Are You My Mother?, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength. To many, her name is synonymous with the Bechdel Test, a metric to evaluate a film’s representation of women. Her new book, Spent: A Comic Novel, hilariously skewers th...

Biographer Ron Chernow’s acclaimed books include Alexander Hamilton, adapted into the Broadway musical Hamilton, and Washington: A Life, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. With his new book Mark Twain, Chernow illuminates the colorful and complex life of the fame-seeking journalist, satirist, performer and political pundit. America’s first literary celebrity, Twain was unique among his contemporaries for grap...

Long before he directed Wicked, In The Heights, or the groundbreaking film Crazy Rich Asians, Jon M. Chu was a movie-obsessed first-generation Chinese American helping at his parents’ Chinese restaurant in Silicon Valley and forever facing the cultural identity crisis endemic to children of immigrants. Growing up on the cutting edge of 21st-century technology gave Chu the tools he needed to make his mark at USC film school...

Our guest today is Anna Malaika Tubbs, a multidisciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender, and equity.  She is the author of “The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation” and the just-published “Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us”.  In both books, Tubbs examines society’s limitations on women and the consequenc...

Ross Gay is a writer with a mission: to help readers explore the beautiful complexities of joy, gratitude, and delight.  In his essays and poetry, Gay brings his overflowing kindness and relentless eye for details to community gardens, the lives of Black people, the artistry of basketball, and much more. He is the author of the poetry collections Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Be Holding, and the essay collections The ...

Alec Karakatsanis is a lawyer, writer, and the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Civil Rights Corps.  He graduated from Yale College and Harvard Law School, and served as a deputy public defender in the District of Columbia.  His books are "Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System" and the newly published "Copaganda", discussing how the news media's portrayal of crime narrows ...

Vauhini Vara is a journalist, novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She began her journalism career as a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal and later launched, edited and wrote for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. 

Her latest book, Searches, is a work of journalism and memoir about how big technology companies are changing our understanding of our selves and our communities. Her debut no...

This is a rebroadcast of a program that originally aired in August of 2023.  We've selected the encore to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the turning point in the Vietnamese diaspora of which Ocean Vuong is a part.   

Ocean Vuong‘s exquisitely crafted poetry and prose ask perennial and pressing questions about race, masculinity, addiction, trauma, and courage. His beloved novel, On Earth We...

 Our guest today is Gianna Toboni, an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker whose new book “The Volunteer” is the unusual story of a Death Row inmate. In 2007, Scott Dozier was convicted of a pair of grisly murders, and sent to Nevada’s Death Row.  Rather than fighting that sentence, Dozier sought to expedite his execution.  But despite his willingness to submit to the sentence, Dozier’s death date was delayed...

Ezra Klein is a columnist and podcast host at The New York Times and the author of Why We’re Polarized. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, host of the podcast Plain English and a news analyst with NPR.   Klein and Thompson’s new book Abundance is a call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic scarcity: from climate change to housing, education to healthcare. The history of the twenty-...

Today, we’ll listen to a conversation with four writers: journalist Michael Lewis, TV host and comedian W. Kamau Bell, novelist Dave Eggers and historian Sarah Vowell – all paying tribute to civil servants, government workers often un-recognized but essential to a functioning democracy. They were profiled in a series of articles in the Washington Post, all of which have been collected in a new book “Who is Government: The ...

Our guest today is poet, author, and meditator Diego Perez, better known by his pen name: Yung Pueblo. A popular voice in the self-improvement space, Pueblo is known for writing – in books and on social media – that focuses on personal development and healthy relationships. His newest book is How to Love Better: The Path to Deeper Connection Through Growth, Kindness, and Compassion.
On March 14, 2025, Yung Pueblo came t...

Our guest today is writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, revered in her home country of Nigeria and in the United States, thanks especially to the popularity of her 2013 novel Americannah, a book that straddles the cultures of America and Nigeria and considers the challenges, status, and perceptions of Africans abroad. 

Since then, Adichie has continued to write fiction and essays on a range of issues, from identity, to grief, t...

Laurie Woolever is a writer, cook, and former right-hand woman to the late Anthony Bourdain.  Woolever’s memoir “Care and Feeding” chronicles her journey through the food world as she navigated addiction, a cultural reckoning, and unexpected tragedy. The intensity of restaurant kitchens and the rock-and-roll lifestyle of celebrity chefs make the book a highly entertaining read, as do Woolever’s nuanced and tender reflectio...

Melissa Clark is the author of more than 30 cookbooks, and a writer at the New York Times, where she appears in a weekly cooking video series.  She’s known for her passionate, but casual, approach to cooking, and her love of anchovies. Emily Weinstein is the editor-in-chief of NYT Cooking and Food whose latest book is “Easy Weeknight Dinners”.  On February 10, 2025, Melissa Clark and Emily Weinstein came to the Sydney Gold...