Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

As government officials, diplomats and business leaders from across the Asia-Pacific converge in San Francisco for APEC 2023 Leaders Week, the question on everyone’s lips is: What next for the U.S.-China relationship? Amid the climate crisis, which necessitates urgent energy transition, how do the two largest economies work together against the backdrop of geopolitical tension? Where does California—the world’s fifth largest economy, a green energy leader and oriented toward Asia across the Pacific—fit in?

Governor Gavin Newsom’s October trip to China underscored the critical relationship between the Golden State and China. California has many trade, technology development, and business relationships with China related to clean energy. At the same time, the United States is broadly looking to reduce reliance on China for products, talent and innovations through many policy incentives for local content and domestic manufacturing and broader policy efforts. How will this trend of localization play out in California, and what does this mean for California to meet its ambitious climate and clean energy targets?

As APEC dialogues unfold, join us to analyze the degree of linkages between China and California in low-carbon energy and the implications for policy at the state, federal and multilateral levels.

Co-presented by UC San Diego's 21st Century China Center & Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California.

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Colleges and universities across the country are the scenes of controversy these days, with students, faculty, lawmakers and donors all seemingly locked in high-volume debate over campus rights, free speech, human rights and international conflicts.

Almost every institution of higher education touts its ability to set its graduates on a course for successful careers in their desired fields. Also high on the list of their brags are the cultural life and sports teams on campus. But colleges and universities have also played important roles in the curation and development of values in our society. Whether they are religious or secular institutions, public or private, their graduates go out into the world not only armed with job skills and networks of friends but also having been exposed to values instruction in many ways.

Sometimes our colleges and universities are out of step with the rest of the country in terms of the nation's values; other times, they preserve and deepen values that most Americans hold dear. 

Just what is the role of these institutions when it comes to American values—in teaching, in challenging, in deepening those values? What exactly are the American values at issue here? Who's succeeding, and what still needs to be done? Join us for a special program addressing these important issues.

This program is part of our American Values Series, underwritten by Taube Philanthropies.

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One of the most common questions people ask about climate is: what can I do? Since time is one of our most valuable resources – and we spend so much of our time at work – changing jobs may be the most effective individual climate action a person can take. Those changes could be big or small: Leaving the oil and gas industry for geothermal, or helping to bring down the emissions where you already work. The truth is, almost any job can be a climate job. But how do people actually make the transition from dirty jobs to clean? What do climate positive job transitions really entail? 

Guests: 

Caroline Dennett, Director, CLOUT Ltd

Arvind Ravikumar, Co-Director, Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab, University of Texas, Austin

Jennifer Anderson, Carbon Removal Geologist, Charm Industrial

Emma McConville, Development Geoscience Lead at Fervo Energy

Nathanael Johnson, Electrician

For show notes and related links, visit our website.

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A Special Program for Families

家族向け特別プログラム

“This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?” – Dorothea Lange

「これが私たちがやったことです。なぜこのようなことが起きたのか？なぜこのようなことができたのか？」―ラング·ドロティア

Fueled by racist fears and wartime hysteria, the U.S. government incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945, many of them families with children. Allowed to bring only what they could carry, the internees were removed from their homes and forced to live under armed guard in makeshift camps, treated with suspicion and hostility; imprisoned without evidence of any crime. Inflated claims of national security risks justified these actions and carefully curated images hid the truth; even today, the story is not well known. 

人種差別的な恐れと戦時のヒステリ-に駆られて、1942年から1945年までに、アメリカ政府は12万人以上の日系アメリカ人を収容しました。その多くは子供を含む家族でした。彼らは手にもてるものしか持参できず、自宅から引き離され、武装警備の下で仮設キャンプで生活するよう強制されました。彼らは疑念と敵意をもって扱われ、犯罪の証拠もないのに収監されました。国家安全保障のリスクの主張がこれらの行動を正当化し、慎重に作られたイメージにより真実が隠されました。今日に至るまで、この事実はあまりよく知られていません。

In her new book for young readers, Elizabeth Partridge examines the reality of life in Manzanar, a camp in the California desert. Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration offers three photographers’ perspectives on the incarceration and illuminates the stories behind their pictures. And it invites us to consider: How could such a gross violation of civil liberties happen in a nation founded on principles of equality and justice for all? Could it happen again?

若い読者向けの新作、エリザベス・パーテリッジはカリフォルニア砂漠のマンザナー収容所での生活の現実を調査しています。『Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams's Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration』は、この収容とその写真の裏にある真実の話を明らかにし、3人の写真家の視点を提供します。そして、私たちに問いかけます：平等と正義の原則に基づく国で、なぜこんなひどい市民権の侵害が起こったのか？それは再び起こる可能性があるのでしょうか？

Bring your family for a conversation with Elizabeth Partridge, who will share how she created her book and why it is so important for all of us to talk about this bitter chapter in American history when the country did not live up to its democratic ideals. Tickets include admission to the Japanese American Museum of San José, which provides a historical forum that stimulates present-day discussions on civil liberties, race relations, discrimination, and American identity.

あなたの家族も一緒に、エリザベス・パーテリッジとの対話の場にご参加ください。彼女は自分の本をどのように創り上げたか、そしてなぜこの苦々しいアメリカの歴史の章について話すことが非常に重要であるかを語ります。 チケットにはサンノゼ日系アメリカ博物館への入場料が含まれています。この博物館は市民権、人種関係、差別、アメリカのアイデンティティに関する現代の議論を刺激する歴史的な施設になります。

This program is part of The Commonwealth Club’s civics education initiative, 

Creating Citizens.

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We've all been through a lot in the past five years, but it's difficult to figure out what it all means, and how it applies to our shared existence in this democratic experiment. Heather Cox Richardson aims to remedy that. 

As a historian she has been examining and explaining modern events aided by her deep understanding of history and insight into the forces working for and against democracy. In her new book Democracy Awakening, Heather Cox Richardson looks at the state of American democracy and the forces that have been driving it toward authoritarianism. In whose interest is the obfuscation of history? Who benefits if Americans are turned off or prevented from taking part in democratic acts? Who and what can help change things and rededicate this country to its founding ideals?

Join us in person as she explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.

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On November 22, 1963, the visual images of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, arguably the most significant crime in modern day history, were seared into the permanent memories of many who were then young adults, teens or children and have continued through the ages for those who have become obsessed with the president’s death. Sixty years later, the yearning for better answers to the questions why and how continues to produce many absurd new speculations and theories to explain his death.

Any detailed review of the evidence in the Warren Commission Report raises so many valid questions that ever since it was issued it has been attacked and undermined, both rationally and irrationally. But in recent years, Mark Shaw says clear answers have emerged through the eyes of Dorothy Kilgallen, the most credible journalist to cover the assassination, in fact, the only one who interviewed Jack Ruby at his 1964 trial.

Based on her investigation, and his research, bestselling author Mark Shaw (The Reporter Who Knew Too Much), whose lectures about his six books touching on the assassination have attracted millions of YouTube views, returns to The Commonwealth Club of California to review what we know and what we don’t know. By doing so, the likely range of what really happened is in clearer focus, and the collateral damage to American politics and to luminaries like Kilgallen, Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy are no longer obscured by distortions of history regarding those remembered images.

MLF ORGANIZER: George Hammond

A Humanities Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

More about Mr. Shaw—the author of nearly 30 books whose body of work is being archived by his alma mater, Purdue University—may be learned at www.markshawbooks.com. 

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Cancel culture—the term and the practice—has left its mark on American culture, business, academia and society at all levels over the past few years. Was it inevitable? Is it permanent? Or is it, as authors Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott argue, a dysfunctional part of how Americans battle for power, status and dominance? They say it is just a symptom of a much larger problem: the use of cheap rhetorical tactics to "win" arguments without actually winning arguments.

Drawing on data and research on the phenomenon of cancel culture and how it works, along with many examples of how both the left and the right use it to silence their enemies, Lukianoff and Schlott have concrete steps to offer that they say can reclaim a free speech culture in every realm.

Lukianoff and Schlott, authors of the bestselling Coddling of the American Mind, return with their new book The Canceling of the American Mind. Join us to hear their description of cancel culture and their prescription for curing it.

NOTES

All in-person attendees will receive a copy of The Canceling of the American Mind compliments of the Ken & Jaclyn Broad Family Fund.

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Climate affects everyone, but not equally. Those affected first and worst are often the same communities that suffer from housing and income inequality, and climate and societal injustice. Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. has made striving for social, economic, and climate justice his lifelong pursuit. Rising to prominence in the Hip Hop community, Yearwood brought like-minded artists and creatives together to advocate for justice with the Hip Hop Caucus by harnessing the power of film, podcasts and comedy.

We discuss the role of his faith, his partnership with billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and the underlying belief in our human ability to keep improving that drives his activism.

Guests: 

Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., CEO, Hip Hop Caucus

Jacqueline Patterson, Executive Director, Chisholm Legacy Project

For show notes and related links, visit our website.

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The Arts Member-led Forum and San Francisco Opera’s Department of Diversity, Equity and Community invite you to a powerful and thought-provoking panel discussion. As home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States, the Bay Area might have special interest in the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for music, Omar, by Grammy Award-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens and composer Michael Abels.The production runs November 5–21 at the War Memorial Opera House.

A true story of an astonishing journey enshrined in a 200-year-old autobiography of enslaved Islamic scholar Omar Ibn Said in the Carolinas, who publicly records his story in Arabic—evidencing the act of writing as the preservation of identity.

Omar is a sweeping canvas of text, Christian and Islamic faith, profoundly realized in Kaneza Schaal’s transcendent production embodying the horrors of the “Middle Passage,” prison life, plantation traumas and creative human spirit.

MLF ORGANIZER: Anne W. Smith

An Arts Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

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Take a walk on the warped side with this in-person program featuring stars in their respective fields.

The new book The Warped Side of Our Universe is the result of the collaboration of Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne and award-winning artist Lia Halloran. It brings to vivid life the wonders and wildness of our universe’s “Warped Side”―objects and phenomena made from warped space and time, from colliding black holes and collapsing wormholes to twisting space vortices and down-cascading time. Through poetic verse and otherworldly paintings, the scientist and the artist explicate Thorne’s and his colleagues’ astrophysical discoveries and speculations, with an epic narrative that asks: How did the universe begin? Can anything travel backward in time? And what weird and marvelous phenomena inhabit the "warped side"?

In their book, Thorne and Halloran take readers on an Odyssean voyage using epic verse and more than 100 pulsating paintings to shed light on time travel, black holes, gravitational waves and the birth of the universe. Join us in-person to hear them share tales of the warped side.

MLF ORGANIZER

George Hammond

A Humanities Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

In Association with Wonderfest.

This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

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