City Arts & Lectures

Abraham Verghese, a physician and bestselling novelist who teaches at Stanford, discusses how medicine and storytelling merge in his work. He talks about empathy in clinical practice, turning family memory and Kerala’s history into fiction, language and revision, and the balance of a medical career with slow, deliberate writing. Short, conversational, and wide-ranging.

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. 

Sally Mann is one of the most significant American photographers of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Mann has explored childhood, family, memory, mortality, and the passage of time, often through experimental and historic photographic processes. From At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988), a nuanced study of girls on the cusp of adolescence, to her landmark series, Immediate Family (1985–1994), occasionally staged photographs of her three children, taken with an 8×10 view camera. In more recent years, Mann turned her lens toward the land itself, using the American South as a site of both personal and collective memory. Mann is the subject of the documentary films Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann (1994). Her memoirs include Hold Still, and now Art Work: On the Creative Life.On February 11, 2026, Sally Mann came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with teacher, writer, and photographer Ted Orland. 

This is an encore presentation of a program originally aired in November of 2024.  In this program, two novelists who've created visions of a future after significant climate change...talk about whether their fiction can help shape reality.  Across his life, Richard Powers has been driven by an insatiable curiosity for humans and the world around us. This has led him from budding scientist to award-winning author, from Bangkok to the Netherlands, and has helped him win a Pulitzer Prize and a Macarthur Genius Grant. Powers is best known for his novels, including The Gold Bug Variations, named a Time Book of the Year, The Echo Maker, which received a National Book Award, and The Overstory, which received a Pulitzer Prize. Powers’ fourteenth novel, Playground delves into the lives of artists, scientists, and teachers who choose to start seastedding - living on floating cities. On October 30, 2024, Richard Powers came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with fellow novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future.

Legendary activist Marsha P. Johnson was one of the most remarkable figures in LGBTQ+ history – central to the Stonewall Riots and the gay liberation movement at large. Her remarkable life story is captured in a new biography by artists and filmmaker Tourmaline. Tourmaline is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work is dedicated to Black trans joy and freedom. She is a TIME 100 Most Influential Person in the World awardee and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has frequently appeared on ABC News, as well as in the New York Times and Vogue. Her art is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, and the Getty Museum. She created the critically acclaimed film Happy Birthday, Marsha!, and she has directed Pride campaigns for Dove, Marc Jacobs, and Reebok. She previously worked with Queers for Economic Justice and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. She lives in Miami, Florida.Kate Schatz is the New York Times-bestselling author of the “Rad Women” book series and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, co-written with W. Kamau Bell. Her novel Where the Girls Were is forthcoming in 2026 from Dial Press. On December 10, 2025, Tourmaline came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater to talk to Kate Schatz about her bool "Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson".  

The work of acclaimed photographer Meghann Riepenhoff examines our relationship to nature and time, both in subject-matter and process. In projects like Litoral Drift, a series of cameral-less cyanotypes, Rieopenhoff makes use of natural elements like water and sediment. Her art is intentionally vulnerable to weather conditions like wind, and her interest in environmental degradation as well as the sublime carry across her work, from Waters of the Americas and State Shift. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Riepnhoff was born in Atlanta and received a BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited internationally at locations including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Denver Art Museum, the Royal Maritime Museum, Centre d’art contemporain de l’Onde, and The Smithsonian. She has published two monographs: Littoral Drift and Ecotone and Ice.  Nigel Poor is a co-founder of Ear Hustle and Bay Area visual artist whose work explores the various ways people make a mark and leave behind evidence of their existence. Her work can be found in various museum collections including the the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the M.H. deYoung Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She is also a professor of photography at California State University, Sacramento. 

This is an encore presentation of a program first broadcast in 2023.  In 2000, Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut short story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Lahiri has gone on to write other critically acclaimed books, including The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. Her collection Roman Stories centers around Rome, not as a setting, but as a protagonist. Translated from Italian, the stories capture Rome as both a metropolis and a monument, multi-faceted and metaphysical, suspended between past and future – and prove that Lahiri is now master of form in her adopted language. On October 13, 2023, Jhumpa Lahiri came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with filmmaker Peter Stein. 

We’re going back to the archives for a 2019 conversation with Meg Wolitzer, whose best-selling books include The Interestings and The Ten-Year Nap. Wolitzer brings readers deep into the lives of her characters, and her clear prose, is infused with sharp observations about group dynamics and ambition. A feminist thread runs throughout all of her work, particularly in her novel “The Wife,” a satirical portrait of a marriage between an acclaimed writer and his overlooked and uncredited spouse. It was adapted into a movie starring Glenn Close. On January 24, 2019 , Meg Wolitzer came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater, to be interviewed by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. The two talked about her just-published work The Female Persuasion, an investigation into power and different generation’s conflicting concepts of feminism.