City Arts & Lectures

This week, we’re returning to a conversation with Charlie Kaufman, recorded in 2020. Kaufman is the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind some of the most inventive films of recent years, including “Adaptation”, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, and “Being John Malkovich”.  He’s also directed films including “Synecdoche, New York”.  His work often explores human memory and consciousness, with a style frequently described as surreal.  At the time of this conversation in 2020, Kaufman had just published his debut novel “Antkind”.  On July 13, 2020, Charlie Kaufman discussed the book and his films with Andrew Sean Greer, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his comic novel “Less”. 

Writer Carmen Maria Machado discusses “I Who Have Never Known Men”, a 1995 novel by Jacqueline Harpman that was republished in 2022 to great acclaim.  It’s a work of speculative dystopian fiction about a group of women who are apparently the only survivors of a global catastrophe.  Machado wrote the introduction for the new edition, and on December 12, 2025, she came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with KQED’s Alexis Madrigal about the book and its connections to her own work.  

 Eleanor Coppola (1936 – 2024) was a conceptual artist and documentary filmmaker. She met her husband, Francis Coppola, in 1962, when she worked as Assistant Art Director on his first feature. Dementia 13. Eleanor went on to make several behind-the-scenes documentaries for films directed by her family. Her books include Notes: On the making of Apocalypse Now and Notes on A Life. At the age of 80, Eleanor directed her first feature film, Paris Can Wait.  Eleanor Coppola’s final memoir, Two of Me: Notes on Loving and Leaving, was published posthumously in November of 2025. 

On December 5, 2025, Eleanor Coppola’s daughter, director Sofia Coppola, came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to read from and discuss her mother’s work.  She was joined by two friends of Eleanor’s who edited her memoir, radio producer Davia Nelson and writer Vendela Vida. 

This is an encore of a program originally broadcast in May of 2025. 

Ross Gay is a writer with a mission: to help readers explore the beautiful complexities of joy, gratitude, and delight.  In his essays and poetry, Gay brings his overflowing kindness and relentless eye for details to community gardens, the lives of Black people, the artistry of basketball, and much more. He is the author of the poetry collections Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Be Holding, and the essay collections The Book of Delights, Inciting Joy and The Book of (More) Delights.

On May 2, 2025, Ross Gay came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to read from his work and talk with poet and editor Aracelis Girmay.  

The iconic activist and philosopher Angela Davis has been a major influence in global politics for more than 50 years. Davis first gained fame in the 1960s and 70s through her work within second-wave feminism and Marxist advocacy, specifically fighting against the firing of Communist professors at University of California. More recently, she has fought for prison abolition and spoken out in support of anti-imperialist movements, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter.
On December 15, 2025, Angela Davis came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to be interviewed on stage by journalist Deepa Fernandes.  

This week, we’re celebrating the life of architect Frank Gehry, with a conversation recorded in 2015. 

Widely regarded as one of the most influential designers of the last century, the Canadian-born architect was known for his use of bold shapes and unconventional building materials like titanium, stainless steel, and even chain-link.  Among his most famous projects are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.  Frank Gehry died on December 5, 2025, at the age of 96. 

In this program, recorded on October 15, 2015, at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco, Gehry talks with his biographer, Paul Goldberger.   Goldberger spent ten years as an architecture critic for the New York Times, where he won the Pulitzer Prize, and 13 years on the staff of The New Yorker.  Goldberger’s book on the life and work of Frank Gehry is “Building Art”. 

Our guest is Rachel Kushner. Her writing includes novels like The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers, and essays on everything from prison abolition to art theory and motorcycle racing. Her fourth novel, Creation Lake, is Kushner’s take on noir. It follows a young woman infiltrating a French anarchist collective. On December 12th, 2024, Kushner came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to Jonah Wiener, a culture journalist and contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. The conversation was wide-ranging, from her research process, to her travels in France, and her opinions on the Tesla Cybertruck. 

Why do people cooperate with one another when they have no (selfish) motivation to do so? Why do we hold onto possessions of little value? And why is the winner of an auction so often disappointed? Hear Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler and his co-author, Alex Imas, discuss these questions, examined in their book The Winner’s Curse, with Michael Lewis.

Richard H. Thaler received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He is a distinguished service professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, coauthor of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Cass Sunstein) and the author of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. 

Alex O. Imas is a professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Among his honors are the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Review of Financial Studies Rising Scholar Award, and the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award. Previously, he was an assistant professor of behavioral economics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Michael Lewis is known for his meticulous research on far-reaching subjects—from the top-secret world of high-frequency trading (Flash Boys), to baseball (Moneyball), to behavioral economics and the friendship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (The Undoing Project), to an account of a band of medical visionaries trying to avert Trump’s calamitous response to the COVID-19 outbreak (The Premonition), to the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby (Going Infinite). Most recently, he authored Who Is Government?, with contributions from W. Kamau Bell, Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggers, and others.

On November 21, 2025, Thaler and Imas visited the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to be interviewed on stage by Michael Lewis.

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.