City Arts & Lectures

PRX

Since 1980, City Arts & Lectures has presented onstage conversations with outstanding figures in literature, politics, criticism, science, and the performing arts, offering the most diverse perspectives about ideas and values. City Arts & Lectures programs can be heard on more than 130 public radio stations across the country and wherever you get your podcasts. The broadcasts are co-produced with KQED 88.5 FM in San Francisco. Visit CITYARTS.NET for more info.

Since 1980, City Arts & Lectures has presented onstage conversations with outstanding figures in literature, politics, criticism, science, and the performing arts, offering the most diverse perspectives about ideas and values. City Arts & Lectures programs can be heard on more than 130 public radio stations across the country and wherever you get your podcasts. The broadcasts are co-produced with KQED 88.5 FM in San Francisco. Visit CITYARTS.NET for more info.

Location:

United States

Genres:

Arts & Culture Podcasts

Networks:

PRX

Description:

Twitter:

@cityartssf

Language:

English

Website:

https://www.cityarts.net/

Episodes

Ocean Vuong and Tommy Orange

4/11/2021

This week, we’ll hear a conversation between two writers with unique perspectives on America. Ocean Vuong is a poet and the author of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The story closely mirrors Vuong’s own life: born in Viet Nam, he was two years old when his family left a refugee camp in the Philippines to come to the US. Tommy Orange published his debut novel, There There, in 2018; it’s about the complex and painful history of a multi-generational Native American family in...

Duration:01:10:03

Mindfulness and Medicine, with Larry Brilliant and Jack Kornfield

4/4/2021

This week, our guests bring us unique perspectives on life during a pandemic. Larry Brilliant is a renowned epidemiologist whose work with the World Health Organization helped eradicate smallpox, giving him keen insights into how governments can help tackle global disease. In a new book, Sometimes Brilliant, he reflects on his remarkable life and his extraordinary experiences as a doctor, innovator, philanthropist, and cultural revolutionary. Jack Kornfield was one of the first people to...

Duration:01:06:50

Jenny Offill

3/28/2021

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things, Dept. of Speculation, and, most recently, Weather. One of the pleasures of reading Offill’s books is hearing the emotional struggles and ambivalent attitudes of very honest narrators. In Weather, the concerns of daily life and parenting combine with the looming apocalypse of climate change. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, the novel asks readers to think about the mundane ways we live and grapple with our rapidly deteriorating...

Duration:01:03:41

Reuben Jonathan Miller

3/21/2021

There are over 2 million people incarcerated in the United States – but tens of millions more who are living with criminal records. This week, we’ll hear about the constraints and challenges faced by formerly incarcerated people. Reuben Jonathan Miller is a sociologist, criminologist and a social worker who teaches at the University of Chicago in the School of Social Service Administration where he studies and writes about race, democracy, and the social life of the city. His book, Halfway...

Duration:01:02:48

Rebecca Handler and Daniel Handler

3/19/2021

In this City Arts & Lectures Podcast exclusive, Daniel Handler and Rebecca Handler talk about family and work in a uniquely familiar conversation that only siblings could have. Rebecca Handler is a writer who lives and works in San Francisco. Her debut novel Edie Richter Is Not Alone features a protagonist who moves with her family to Perth, Australia following the death of her father. There, she finds herself isolated and forced to confront a painful secret from her past. Daniel Handler...

Duration:00:59:32

Patricia Lockwood

3/14/2021

Poet, memorist, and essayist Patricia Lockwood is perhaps best known for her memoir Priestdaddy, an extraordinarily funny account of growing up the daughter of the most singular Catholic priest in America. Lockwood has just published her first novel, No One is Talking About This, reckons with the feeling of being eternally online, unable to shut off the feed that keeps on scrolling, no matter what we do to stop it. She’s a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, and has a vast...

Duration:01:05:12

Susan Choi

3/6/2021

This week, our guest is novelist Susan Choi. She’s the author of five books, most recently “Trust Exercise”. It centers on a group of teenagers at a competitive art school in 1980s suburbia. What starts out as something straightforward becomes more complex – and with an experimental narrative structure that concludes with a surprise twist. The book won the 2019 National Book Award for fiction. Choi teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn. On February 16, 2021, Susan Choi spoke...

Duration:01:06:30

Lily King

2/28/2021

Our guest is Lily King, the award-winning author of five novels. Her 2014 novel “Euphoria” was inspired by the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead. Last year, King published “Writers and Lovers”, the story of an aspiring author finding her way in the world. Written with her trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, “Writers & Lovers” explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another. On February 18, 2021, Lily King talked with...

Duration:01:06:49

The Science of Sleep with Matthew Walker

2/21/2021

Why do humans sleep? What is sleep’s evolutionary basis? And what is really going on while we sleep? This week, we broadcast a conversation with cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Walker, talking to Indre Viskontas, originally recorded in 2015. Walker is an expert in sleep science, and his research reveals that every tissue in the body and every process within the brain is enhanced as we sleep – and impaired when we’re not sleeping enough. His research also examines the effects of stress,...

Duration:01:07:38

Dr. Carl Hart "Drug Use for Grown-Ups"

2/7/2021

Dr. Carl Hart is a neuroscientist and psychologist at Columbia University whose research focuses on the effects of psychoactive drugs on the brain. He’ll talk about his positions on recreational drug use, which continue to spark controversy and are often at odds with others in his field. Hart’s latest book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, draws on decades of research and his own personal experience to argue that the criminalization and demonization of drug use,...

Duration:01:10:04

Cheryl Dunye

1/31/2021

This week, a conversation with filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. Dunye first emerged in the 1990’s as part of the “Queer New Wave”, and much of her work explores questions of race and gender, using her own experience as a lens. Her debut feature film, “The Watermelon Woman”, is now considered a classic of queer cinema, and her style – a mixture of documentary aesthetic and fictive elements – has earned the term “Dunyementary”. Her films, including a collection of her documentary shorts, were recently...

Duration:01:05:40

Gabriel Byrne

1/24/2021

We’ve long admired Gabriel Byrne for his nuanced performances in films like The Usual Suspects, Miller’s Crossing, and Dead Man, and the television series In Treatment, for which he won a Golden Globe. Byrne’s thoughtful, understated acting style is reflected in his writing. His new memoir, Walking with Ghosts, far from a celebrity tell-all, is an exquisite portrait of an Irish childhood and a remarkable journey to Hollywood and Broadway success. The book follows Byrne from his childhood...

Duration:01:09:17

The Future of Polling

1/17/2021

This week, a conversation with two veteran political opinion researchers about the future of polling. They’ll explore to what extent election outcomes can accurately be anticipated. Many believe the predictions before our last two presidential elections were misleading. How much validity is there to that belief? And can polling evolve to better serve us? We’ll hear from Peter Hart and Neil Newhouse, two veteran pollsters from different ends of the political spectrum.

Duration:01:04:58

Robert Sapolsky

1/10/2021

This week, we are presenting an encore of a 2017 conversation with Dr. Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky is a primatologist and neurologist with a unique gift for storytelling. Oliver Sacks called him “one of the best scientist-writers of our time”. Sapolsky has spent decades studying primate behavior. One of his most consuming fascinations is how humans are both the most violent species on earth – as well as the most altruistic, cooperative, and empathetic. That paradox, and the factors behind it,...

Duration:01:11:04

Ear Hustle

12/27/2020

This week, a conversation with two of the creators of Ear Hustle, the first podcast created and produced in prison. The show features stories of the daily realities of life inside California’s San Quentin State Prison, shared by those living it. Ear Hustle was launched in 2017; at the time, Earlonne Woods was an inmate at San Quentin. His sentence was commuted in 2020. Now, Woods co-hosts the podcast from outside the prison walls, along with Nigel Poor, a well-respected photographer whose...

Duration:01:01:18

Thomas Keller

12/20/2020

Thomas Keller is the first and only American chef to have two Michelin Guide three-star-rated restaurants, The French Laundry and per se, both of which continue to rank among the best restaurants in America and the world. He is also the author of The French Laundry Cookbook, Bouchon, Under Pressure, Ad Hoc at Home, Bouchon Bakery, and his new book The French Laundry, Per Se. On October 26, 2020, Keller spoke with food journalist Amanda Hesser, co-founder and CEO of Food52. They discussed...

Duration:01:03:51

Race, Storytelling, and the Future of Journalism with W. Kamau Bell and Chan’Cellore Makanjuola

12/13/2020

In the past year, journalists have been out in the streets covering racial reckoning and protest. Inside newsrooms – which are overwhelmingly white – media organizations are beginning to confront inequity in their own ranks. When journalism is mostly led by a privileged class of white men, what does that mean for the kinds of stories that get covered, missed, or undervalued? On November 20, 2020, in a co-production with the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California,...

Duration:01:01:01

Crosstalk Part Two: Genre is Cancelled

12/6/2020

Crosstalk is a two-part series of compiled conversations between City Arts & Lectures guests from the previous three years, discussing literary identity and the sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, act of writing. Guests include Ocean Vuong, Zadie Smith, Marlon James, Ottessa Moshfegh, Tommy Orange, Eileen Myles, Rebecca Solnit, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Duration:00:59:19

Crosstalk Part One: Writing Identity

11/29/2020

Crosstalk is a two-part series of compiled conversations between City Arts & Lectures guests from the previous three years discussing literary identity and the sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, act of writing. Guests include Ocean Vuong, Zadie Smith, Marlon James, Ottessa Moshfegh, Tommy Orange, Eileen Myles, Rebecca Solnit, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Crosstalk is produced by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo.

Duration:00:58:48

Going Meatless: The Future of Sustainable Food

11/22/2020

Our guests are a chef and a scientist who are tackling climate change through creating sustainable food. Pat Brown is a biochemist and founder of Impossible Foods, a company at the forefront of making nutritious meat and dairy products from plants to satisfy meat lovers and address the environmental impact of animal farming. Traci Des Jardins is the chef-owner of several restaurants, from fine dining to casual eateries. She was one of the first chefs to put the Impossible Burger on her menu...

Duration:01:05:27