Silicon Valley Reads celebrates its 21st year with Lily Brooks-Dalton, Favianna Rodriguez, Alexandria Villaseñor, and Heather White.
Our featured authors and book contributors will focus on environmental sustainability and explore the challenges and opportunities of creating a more sustainable future, not only in Santa Clara County but worldwide.
They will share more about their work and efforts to create awareness and meaningful change for the future.
Hosted by Santa Clara County Library District, Santa Clara County Office of Education, San José Public Library, and DeAnza College.
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Silicon Valley Reads 2024: A Greener Tomorrow Starts Today

The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's largest public affairs forum. The nonpartisan and nonprofit Club produces and distributes programs featuring diverse viewpoints from thought leaders on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast — the oldest in the U.S., since 1924 — is carried on hundreds of stations. Our website features audio and video of our programs. This podcast feed is usually updated multiple times each week.

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Learn about the forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas and their 50-year sisterhood, a legacy unknown—until now.
At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Lydia Abarca was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company—the Dance Theatre of Harlem, a troupe of women and men who became each other’s chosen family. She was the first Black company ballerina on the cover of Dance magazine, an Essence cover star; she was cast in The Wiz and in a Bob Fosse production on Broadway. She performed in some of ballet’s most iconic works with other trailblazing ballerinas, including the young women who became her closest friends—founding Dance Theatre of Harlem members Gayle McKinney-Griffith and Sheila Rohan, as well as first-generation dancers Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells.
These Swans of Harlem performed for the Queen of England, Mick Jagger, and Stevie Wonder, on the same bill as Josephine Baker, at the White House, and beyond. But decades later there was almost no record of their groundbreaking history to be found.
Out of a sisterhood that had grown even deeper with the years, these Swans joined forces again—to share their story with the world.
Join us for a lively discussion revealing the glamour and grit of professional ballet, a riveting account of five extraordinarily accomplished women, a celebration of both their historic careers and the sustaining, grounding power of female friendship—and a window into the robust history of Black ballet, hidden for too long.
This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.
This program contains EXPLICIT language.
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Karen Valby and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin: The Swans of Harlem

An innovative investigation of the five strange worlds that worship women’s chests.
After years of biopsies, sociologist and bestselling author Sarah Thornton made the difficult decision to have a double mastectomy. But, after her reconstructive surgery, she was perplexed: What had she lost? And gained? An experienced sleuth, she resolved to venture behind the scenes to uncover the social and cultural significance of breasts.
Join us in person or online as Thornton talks with Michael Lewis and draws on what she learned from latest book, which excavates the diverse truths of mammary glands from the strip club to the operating room, from the nation’s oldest human milk bank to the fit rooms of bra designers. Thornton has insights from plastic surgeons, lactation consultants, body-positive witches, lingerie models, and “free the nipple” activists to explore the status of breasts as emblems of femininity. She examines how women’s chests have become a billion-dollar business, as well as a stage for debates about race, class, gender and desire.
Blending sociology, reportage, and personal narrative with refreshing optimism and wit, Thornton has one overriding ambition―to liberate breasts from what she says are centuries of patriarchal prejudice.
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Sarah Thornton with Michael Lewis: Myths and Misconceptions About Breasts

Ready for an adventure into the “bare stuff of reality”?
Join us for a special online program when theoretical physicist Sean Carroll returns to the Club on the occasion of the publication of his new book Quanta and Fields, the second book of his internationally acclaimed series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. Quantum field theory is how modern physics describes nature at its most profound level. Starting with the basics of quantum mechanics itself, Carroll explains measurement and entanglement before explaining how the world is really made of fields.
Why is matter solid? Why is there antimatter? Where do the sizes of atoms come from? And why are the predictions of quantum field theory so spectacularly successful? Carroll explains fundamental ideas like spin, symmetry, Feynman diagrams, and the Higgs mechanism are explained.
Sean Carroll is creating a new approach to sharing physics with a broad audience, one that goes beyond analogies to show how physicists really think. He cuts to the bare mathematical essence of our most profound theories, explaining every step in a uniquely accessible way.
In association with Wonderfest.
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Sean Carroll: Exploring Quanta and Fields

Can you imagine an America where housing, health care, a college education, dignified work, family care, an inheritance, and an income floor are not only attainable by all but guaranteed, by our government, for everyone? But isn’t this pie-in-the-sky thinking? Not by a long shot, according to Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project. She says our current economic system is chock full of government-backed guarantees, from bailouts to bankruptcy protection, to keep the private sector in business. So why can’t the same be true for the rest of us?
Her vision for a new American Guarantee is rooted in real-life experiences, collaborations with some of today’s most important activists and visionaries, and a concrete sense of the policies that are possible—and ready to implement—in 21st-century America.
Natalie Foster joins with Dr. Darrick Hamilton, economics professor at The New School for Social Research, to discuss shifting the debate about our shared economic system.
 
 
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Natalie Foster with Darrick Hamilton: The Guarantee

Who is the American working class? Do they still have a fair shot at the American Dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life?
Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working-class fighting tooth and nail to survive. In her new book Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning ladies, health care aides, police officers, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans told Ungar-Sargon the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives, as well as what policies they think would improve them. Ungar-Sargon’s reporting and research on America’s emergent class divide reveals people for whom the most basic elements of a secure and stable life are increasingly out of reach for those without a college education.
She says America has broken its contract with its laboring class. So, how do we get back to the American Dream? How do we once again become the land of opportunity, the promised land where hard work and commitment to family are enough to protect you from poverty? Ungar-Sargon says all it would take is for those in power to once again respect the dignity of work—and the American worker.
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Silicon Valley Reads 2024: A Greener Tomorrow Starts Today

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