City Arts & Lectures

Our guest this week is Emily St. John Mandel, a writer whose work experiments with literary noir, speculative fiction, and horror.  Her bestselling books include The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, and her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven was adapted into a limited series for HBO. This year, Mandel returns with her new novel Exit Party, diving into a future United States locked in a new civil war. It is within this painful landscape that Mandel explores freedom, surveillance, and the possibility of a better world.

On September 18, 2026, Emily St. John Mandel came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with Daniel Handler, the author of numerous books for all ages – sometimes under the pen name Lemony Snicket. 

Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson has dedicated his career to helping the poor, defending the incarcerated, and fighting for equality and justice. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative.  The nonprofit has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of incarcerated people, and ending mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children. His book Just Mercy is a New York Times bestseller, and was made into a film starring Michael B. Jordan. On September 10, 2026, Bryan Stevenson came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with Lisa Armstrong, a journalist and professor at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. 

This week, we remember the life of writer, poet, farmer, and environmentalist Wendell Berry, by listening back to a 2010 conversation with fellow writer and activist Michael Pollan. 

Berry was of America’s most influential voices on agriculture and the environment, and he wrote with a calm and compelling vision about our relationship with the land, our work, and our communities. Among his best-known books: The Unsettling of America, What Are People For?, and The Peace of Wild Things.

After studying at the University of Kentucky and Stanford, and teaching at New York University, Berry returned to his native Henry County, Kentucky in the 1960s. There, he and his wife, Tanya, began farming. Berry spent the rest of his life in Kentucky,  farming and writing poems, novels, and essays about tending the land, about community, and the costs of an increasingly industrialized society. 

Berry was also an activist, protesting the Vietnam War, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and nuclear power, and he inspired generations of environmentalists, farmers, food activists, and writers. 

Berry died on August 31, 2026, at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92.

This week, we remember the life of Gloria Steinem – legendary feminist, activist, and journalist, with a rebroadcast of a conversation recorded in San Francisco on November 9, 2015.

For more than half a century, Gloria Steinem was one of the most influential voices for women’s rights, equality, and social justice.

Steinem began her journalism career in New York, gaining national attention with an undercover investigation of the working conditions at the Playboy Club. In 1971, she co-founded Ms. Magazine, a groundbreaking publication that centered women’s lives in the larger political and cultural conversation. 

Steinem was a mentor to generations of women - whether through her writing, her activism, or simply her example, Steinem offered women an invitation to speak out, organize, and imagine a different future.  City Arts & Lectures’ founder, Sydney Goldstein, was one of those women, and Gloria was a guest onstage many times - and lent her advice and support offstage.

Gloria Steinem died on September 3, 2026, in New York. She was 92.

In this 2015 appearance, Steinem talked with filmmaker, activist and artist Chinaka  Hodge, after the publication of her memoir, My Life On The Road. 

Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, is one of today’s leading voices addressing issues of income inequality.  Reich served in three presidential administrations, and recently retired from teaching at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Policy after nearly 20 years.  His classes were among the most popular on campus, and the end of his teaching career inspired the documentary “The Last Class”.  Reich publishes extensively on social media and is the author of more than 20 books including his 2025 memoir, “Coming Up Short”. 

On July 23, 2025, Reich spoke with Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit multimedia news organization that houses Mother Jones magazine and the radio show and podcast Reveal.