Speakers Forum

Dan Savage celebrates and reflects as Savage Love turns 30

‘Every building is a philosophy in a way. I see all buildings as attempts to try to figure out and express what it means to dwell as a human being on Earth.’

‘The land knows you, even when you are lost.’

‘What do we owe in death? What do we owe to our parents?’

‘A Little Book of Self-Care for Those Who Grieve began as notes scratched out over many midnights; thoughts formed as I lay sleepless, or in the aftermath of painful dreams.’

‘The agents say they’ll put themselves between a bullet and the president. They’ll take a bullet for the president. Well, they felt like more and more they were just dodging a bullet.’

‘If people hear something that’s false, and they’re immediately told it’s false, then they will remember it in some sense or in some part of their mind as true for the long-term. That’s insidious!’

As a teen, Chinese American author Anna Qu was forced by her mother to work in their family's garment factory in Queens, New York. At home she was the family’s maid, and faced punishment for doing things like schoolwork. Qu contacted Child Protective Services to report her mother, but due to bureaucratic bumbling she was left her to fend for herself. Now as an adult, Qu reckons with life, family, and not so easy answers to past trauma in her memoir.

Social Distancing may be drawing to a close, but that doesn’t mean folks are eager to come together just yet. The potential unity among Americans, involving civil civic discourse, continues to prove a bumpy road, to say the least. But according to the speakers in this talk, it’s a journey still worth committing to, having ‘faith’ in, and suffering through, together.

It has been just over six years since the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. In his new, exhaustively researched book The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage, author Sasha Issenberg shares many of the stories and successful strategies that led to marriage equality.

‘Nothing should be lost. Everything has a purpose. Everything is in need of care.’

In his new book After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made, author Ben Rhodes grapples with the dissolving notion of American exceptionalism in a post-Covid world. Using a global lens, Rhodes presents a glimpse of a highly possible democracy-free future, presently modeled by countries like Hungary, Russia, and China.

Make Love Not Porn founder Cindy Gallop says the future of pornography is "social sex" and the end of fetishizing women of color.

Author Grace M. Cho breaks bread with the numerous voices haunting her ‘pained spirit’ in her new novel.

White Freedom: ‘The belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free.’

Godin’s new book sheds an intriguing light on the tropes surrounding those on the spectrum of blindness.

‘Most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom, but surely that is one of them.’

‘Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations. They inform our sense of self, telling us what kind of people we believe we are, what kind of nation we believe we live in.’

"In any given moment the human eye takes in about a billion bits of information. The brain discards the vast majority of that information, and processes about 40 bits of information."

Chinese American photographer Andrew Kung is reclaiming representation of the all-American man one portrait at a time.