David Mitchell and Pico Iyer - Encore

We’re going back into the archives for a conversation with David Mitchell, recorded in 2021.  In novels like Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks, Mitchell weaves together the supernatural and the natural. He’s also one of the most structurally inventive writers of our time, featuring multiple genres in a single book.  On May 8, 2021, Mitchell talked to Pico Iyer, whose books include Aflame, The Art of Stillness and The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise. What transpired was a nuanced examination of creativity by two formidable writers.

A conversation about the evolving world of psychedelics. While scientific breakthroughs continue to reshape our understanding of how these substances work, psychedelics are also at the center of debates about religious freedom, mystical experiences, politics, and how we treat mental health.For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. His acclaimed books include How to Change Your Mind, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire. Pollan co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.Gül Dölen is professor at UC Berkeley in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychology. Her research expertise and interests include behavioral and systems neuroscience, psychedelics, social behavior, evolution, synaptic plasticity, extracellular matrix, oxytocin and stroke, autism, PTSD, and addiction.Indre Viskontas is a cognitive neuroscientist with the University of San Francisco and a faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She has published groundbreaking work on the neural basis of memory and creativity, and co-hosts the podcast Inquiring Minds. Her past City Arts guests include Atul Gawande and Temple Grandin.

Shoshana von Blanckensee is a novelist whose debut work, Girls Girls Girls, explores coming of age, queer identity, and San Francisco in the 1990s. It follows Hannah, a young queer Jewish woman, as she embarks on a cross-country journey with her high school girlfriend - in search of acceptance and a vibrant queer community.On June 13, 2025, Shoshana von Blanckensee visited the KQED studios in San Francisco for a conversation with Poulomi Saha, an English professor and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.

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 author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption. 

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 volcanic eruption, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In her new memoir, A Different Kind of Power, Ardern describes how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt made political history and changed our assumptions of what a global leader can be - caring, empathetic, and effective.On June 9, 2025, The Right Honourable Dame Jacinda Ardern came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans.

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 male chef to be so honored. He is the author of six cookbooks, including The French Laundry Cookbook, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.Alice Waters is the visionary chef and owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. She is the author of four cookbooks, including Chez Panisse Vegetables and Fanny at Chez Panisse. In 1994 she founded the Edible schoolyard at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, a model curriculum that integrates organic gardening into academic classes and into the life of the school.On May 29, 2025,  Thomas Keller and Alice Waters came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with Phil Rosenthal, the creator of the PBS documentary series “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having” and Netflix’s “Somebody Feed Phil.” 

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 the absurdities of modern life while delivering a rollicking case for embracing life’s messy truths before it’s too late.  In Spent, a fictional version of Bechdel lives on a goat sanctuary in Vermont, where she is visited by the older versions of the central characters of Dykes to Watch Out For among others.  On May 27, 2025, Alison Bechdel came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to read from her work, show slides, and answer questions from her fans.  She was introduced by artist Wendy MacNaughton. 

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 grappling so fully with the legacy of slavery, including with his most famous book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  On May 21, 2025, Ron Chernow came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with Jonathan Bass. 

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 and to be discovered by Steven Spielberg, but he soon found himself struggling to understand who he was. In Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen, Chu questions what it means when your dreams collide with your circumstances and how it’s possible to succeed even when the world changes beyond all recognition.  On August 3, 2024, Jon M. Chu came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with writer, actor, comedian, and rapper Nora Lum, aka “Awkwafina,”, who starred in Crazy Rich Asians.  This program originally aired in August 2024. 

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 consequences of those systems of oppression.  Tubbs argues that this is no coincidence – it’s as essential to maintaining power structures today as it was when the United States was founded.  But what can seem intractable doesn’t need to be – Tubbs says “it’s all made up, so let’s make up something different”. On May 13, 2025, Anna Malaika Tubbs came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with podcaster, human rights activist and social impact strategist Jamira Burley.