This week, our guest is Padma Lakshmi. As host of shows like Taste the Nation and Top Chef, Lakshmi champions cooks and eaters from across cultures. She’s the author of several cookbooks –  including her newest, Padma's All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond – and the memoir Love Loss and What We Ate. Lakshmi’s passion for social justice causes, as well as her deep appreciation for food, are both reflected in her active social media presence. 

On November 17, 2025, Lakshmi came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk – and laugh – with comedian and broadcaster W. Kamau Bell.

This week, our guest is Salman Rushdie. Over the course of six decades, Rushdie has made a profound impact on literature and free speech. He is the author of fifteen novels, including Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, two short story collections, and six works of nonfiction, most recently, his memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

On November 16, 2025, Rushdie came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Poulomi Saha about some of the impacts of the attack he suffered in 2022, and how the themes in his newest story collection, The Eleventh Hour, connect to his past work.

This week, our guest is Richard Misrach — one of the most influential voices in contemporary photography. His work appears in major museum collections around the world, and his innovative approach to large-scale color photography has influenced generations of artists. 

Since the 1970s, his work has merged aesthetics and activism, often depicting human impact on the environment. In series like Desert Cantos, Petrochemical America, and most recently, Cargo, rich colors and tranquil landscapes belie the ecological disasters that exist below the surface.  

On November 11, 2025, Misrach came to the KQED studios to talk to Steven Winn about his newest project – photographs of cargo ships into and from the Port of Oakland taken from 2021-2025, on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work is collected in a new book, Cargo, featuring an introduction by his longtime friend and frequent collaborator Rebecca Solnit.

This week,  an encore of our 2023 conversation with legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog. He’s made over 70 movies – most of them documentaries like Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Grizzly Man. Herzog’s style is so distinctive that his films are recognizable practically from the moment they start. His techniques can be controversial too, when it comes to his unusual casting, and his own presence in the stories he’s telling. On October 21, 2023, Herzog came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Caterina Fake about filmmaking and writing, including his new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All.

This week, our guest is Susan Orlean, the author of The Orchid Thief, The Library Book, and On Animals. Whether exploring the eccentric world of orchid collectors, untangling the mystery of a devastating fire at the Los Angeles Public Library, or examining animal-human relationships, she brings humor, curiosity, and humanity to all the stories she writes.

Her new book, Joyride, is a collection of essays that highlights her fascination with the remarkable details of everyday life.

On October 6, 2025, Susan Orlean joined us at the KQED studios to speak with Steven Winn about storytelling, obsession, and what continues to inspire her writing after more than three decades chronicling the world’s oddities for The New Yorker.

This week, our guest is Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial news reporter at The New York Times, and co-anchor of Squawk Box on CNBC. His new book is 1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History. It’s an in depth look at America’s most famous financial event, and Sorkin believes there are major parallels to today’s market. 

On October 18, 2025 Sorkin came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with Patrick Collison, founder of the payments processing platform Stripe.

 This week, our guest is Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia Journalism School and one of today’s most important public intellectuals.  As a staff writer for The New Yorker, Cobb brings his deep knowledge of American history to contemporary subjects, particularly government and politics. His new book, “Three or More is a Riot”, combines narrative journalism, criticism and profiles that examine race and culture.  On October 16, 2025, Jelani Cobb came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to john a. powell, founder and director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. 

Daniel Handler’s sardonic sense of humor and deep pathos have engaged readers across genres for over twenty-five years. Handler’s best known for his series of children’s books A Series of Unfortunate Events under the pen name Lemony Snicket).  His books published under his own name include Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates), and the memoir, And Then? And Then? What Else? which has just been published in paperback. 

Andrew Sean Greer’s six works of fiction include the bestsellers The Story of a Marriage, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Less (which earned him the Pulitzer Prize), and Less is Lost. 

On October 8, 2025, Daniel Handler and Andrew Sean Greer took to the stage of the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco, for a program they call “Paragraphs on Ice!” in which they dissect paragraphs written by other notable authors. It was a lesson in the art of writing – and the art of close reading. 

Author and cultural critic Jeff Chang's new book is “Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America”.  The world’s most celebrated martial artist and one of the best-known action stars ever, Bruce Lee is a global icon.  Born in San Francisco in 1940, Lee spent his childhood in war-ravaged Hong Kong, where he began his acting career in its emerging film industry.  When he returned to the US at the age of 18, Lee studied philosophy and drama, and taught martial arts to major Hollywood actors before becoming a star himself.  On September 25, 2025, Jeff Chang talked to journalist, podcaster, and educator Shereen Marisol Meraji about his biography of Bruce Lee and his role in Asian American culture. 

This week, the story behind one of the country’s premier dining destinations, Russ & Daughters.  What began as a pushcart in 1904 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is now an internationally-renowned retail operation, with three shops, a restaurant, and a mail-order business that delivers traditional Jewish foods nationwide.  Russ & Daughters’ specialty is “appetizing” – smoked and cured salmon, pickled herring, bagels, cream cheese, and more.  Running the business today are Josh Russ Tupper and Niki Russ Federman, fourth-generation torchbearers of their family’s legacy.  On September 5, 2025, they visited the KQED studios in San Francisco to talk to writer Rebecca Handler, about growing up in the family business and what it takes to keep it alive, and their new cookbook “Russ & Daughters, 100 Years of Appetizing”.